I’ve started yet another project and I thought I would spill it. Have you ever heard of a “game” called Second Life? Well I’ve played it for a few years and I’ve seen people make quite a living for themselves on it. The concept is simple…Run any type of business in this Second “virtual” Life and you earn what are called Linden dollars. Those linden dollars can then be turned into real life dollars at a rate of 261 Linden per $1USD. There literally is ANY kind of business including night clubs, real estate, clothing designs, tattoos, furniture, food items, weapons and yes…even sex. Ok, I’ve decided to stay away from the sex stuff. Call me a prude, but I just can’t get into that in a game. But people are paying serious money for this. There was a recent article about one Second Life player (Anshe Chung)who just earned ONE MILLION real USD in this game from selling land. Read about it here.

As a programmer, I can see how creating items for people who are seriously into this game can be lucrative. Not everyone has the know how to program or design items for a game that look good.  I have even enlisted my boyfriend to “play” this game with me and we are building things together. We started off buying our own “land”. Buying the land isn’t cheap…and hey, someone else just made money off me. Then we built up this city we are calling “Krimzon Rain”. Inside this city, we have built all the regular things you would find in a city such as a night club, furniture shop, bakery, etc. And we themed it to be sort of a gothic dark side. There is a HUGE community for that in Second Life. The club we are using as a means to draw traffic to our land and we host a few night time events with music. But the bulk of the income is expected to come from the sales of the items we create in our shops. For example, I have a gothic looking bed with a skull on it. I sell it for 1500L, which is roughly $5.75USD. Keeping in line with my passive income ideas, I build this bed once and sell it over and over again. Just an FYI…I sold 3 of these beds yesterday and didn’t set foot in my “store”. And this is just one item. My boyfriend who is helping me has created a weapons shop where he builds weapons, armor and other items for those who wish to have combat in the game. We also built our very own tournament arena and will hold weekly tournaments with players for prizes. This helps build traffic which helps to bring in more people to buy from our shops.

I know this is probably one of the craziest ideas I have tried yet. But doing the math seems to work out on paper. It’s an expensive startup with having to buy the “land” so I expect to have a loss for the first couple of months or so until I can get our traffic built up. But I think overtime, it will pay off. I will definitely keep you posted.

Adding a Google adsense block on your website is a great way to add a little bit of extra residual income to your revenue pool. How does it work? It’s about as easy as anything else out there. You simply place a snippet of code into your website (very similar to how we added affiliate banners) and you earn a certain amount of money for every click through on your website. Pretty simple huh?

If you haven’t already done so, go ahead and create your Google Adsense account on google.com and use their easy to follow prompts for creating a “Adsense of Content” adsense code. Depending on the layout of your website, you can display banners or text and in any number of size formats.  Because my website is a 3 column layout, I am going to go with a skyscraper style Adsense to create a long skinny block of ads. Be sure to customize the colors of your Adsense code to match the colors of your website. You can check out my Google Adsense setup on my working project Ultimate Website Traffic Secrets.

If your ad doesn’t show up immediately on your website, give it about 10 minutes. Google tends to have a delay on these things and often won’t show up immediately.

Easy enough for ya?

On the first day of this challenge we talked about a program called Market Samurai and how I use it to determine topics for my content niche blogs. This program shows me related keywords to the content subject so that I have a handy list I can refer back to at anytime when I am writing so that I can be sure that the articles I write are filled with my keywords so the search engines like them. In the end the goal is to create information rich content that our readers find interesting and that the search engines like enough to put us near the top of search results.

The articles you use on your content niche website can be written by you as an original piece, written by you as a sourced article, given by a guest blogger or one of several other ways of obtaining information for your website. However, to get started we are going to focus on writing the content ourselves. This way we know it’s unique, it’s written with keywords in mind and we have total control over it.

If you have Market Samurai you can use the “Find Content” module within it to find sourced content that you can use as an information base for your own unique articles. A quick note, I would like to mention regarding writing from sourced content: Do not ever copy and paste any article in whole or in part and claim it as your own and if you do use copy from a source, ensure to give credit to the author. This is just common sense guys and good practice. What I am talking about here is reading articles or websites written by other people and retaining the information to help you write your own articles. For example, if you need to write an article about “How to take care of a cactus plant” you may not know every detail on the matter, so you might go look up tips and ideas from other people. You don’t want to copy them word for word, but there is nothing wrong with rewording ideas from memory to include in your own article.

On the flip side, you may have a head full of information on the subject you are writing about and don’t need to research anything. If that is the case, write away like mad and just follow a few simple writing tips.

• Your first paragraph should be clear, concise and explain exactly what the rest of the article is about.
• Keep paragraphs short. It’s easier to retain smaller amounts of information and with more white space your eyes (and your readers’ eyes) will thank you.
• Ensure that your title, subject line or heading contains 1 or 2 of your keywords and also attracts the reader to actually want to find out more information about what you wrote.
• When you are outlining points, be sure to use bullets to separate out your ideas.
• Keep your topic focused on one specific topic. If you have more related ideas, write another article.
• Give lots of examples and tell stories if you have one that supports what you are writing. This will help backup your points but also may relate to your readers on a higher level.
• Give your readers lots of resources including books, website links and any other information that they can get themselves to support what you wrote.

End the day today by posting your very first keyword rich article on your blog. Be sure to define a category for every article you post so that they can be easily found at a later date if someone searches your website for something specific. Don’t forget to include an image with your blog posts if you can find one to go with it.

We know what we are going to blog about right? Maybe you’re going to blog about cooking, being a single parent, weddings, relationships or starting your own business. Whatever you are going to write about you are going to need to take the first steps in setting up your website (blog).

Before you can do anything with setting up a blog you are going to need to purchase a domain name for yourself. The domain name should obviously be related to your content, easy to remember and keyword rich for search engine purposes. For example, on this blog I write about all the different ways to make a passive income, so I chose the domain name www.purelypassiveincome.com. You can purchase the domain yourself through a service like GoDaddy.com or you can let your hosting company purchase the domain for you. Once you have your domain chosen let’s start setting up our website.

I am a HUGE fan of WordPress. It is one of the most customizable and easy to use blog software available and it’s the only one I use. All of my niche content websites use WordPress. The only problem with WordPress is that if you plan on placing ads or making money off of it, you can’t have the free WordPress hosting to host it for you. You will need to obtain your own hosting to host the blog software. The good news is it’s totally easy to set it up and almost every hosting company out there supports WordPress now. Some even have a one click install option. The other good news is that it is relatively cheap to host your own. Check out BlueHost for one hosting option, but really any host will work.

Follow the setup instructions either from your hosting company or from WordPress directly on how to setup the blog software. It shouldn’t take but a few minutes (or seconds if your host has a one click install) and you are ready to go. You will start with a blank slate, a pretty basic look and feel to it and some dummy content for your first post already in it. The first thing I do is go into the admin panel and delete the dummy post and comments. I also purge out all of the links because they usually have nothing to do with what I’m posting about.

Next, you will want to give your blog a new design with a WordPress theme. There are many free WordPress theme websites that you can download hundreds of themes to install. One of my favorites is WordPress Themes Base. To install a theme, all you have to do is go into the “Appearance” tab in the admin panel and Add a New Theme via the upload feature. You’ll upload the entire .zip file that you downloaded from the website and activate it upon a successful upload. Your entire blog design will change right before your eyes. It’s pretty cool and very easy!

After your blog has taken on a new appearance you will want to go into the “settings” tab and start setting up other important details for your blog such as your blog title, tagline, permalinks, writing and reading options and any other area you might want to customize. Just start checking out each section and modify until everything looks the way you want it to.

Setting up your first blog will probably take a little trial and error if you don’t have a one click install available and have never done anything like this before. Your hosting company will probably be happy to help you or you can post questions you have to this post in the comment section and I will try to help you out if I can.

There you have it! Your domain name is working, your hosting account setup and your WordPress blog is ready for your information! In the next post I make we are going to start working on making this thing a little more than just an empty wasteland so stay tuned!

My number one criteria…I WANT TO MAKE MONEY. If I can’t make money with it, I don’t want to have anything to do with it. I want to write about something I know REALLY well. I want to be passionate about it so that I don’t run out of things to say. I want to be knowledgeable about it so that I understand the competing industries and be able to recommend the right products that would go well with it for affiliate sales purposes. I also want to make sure that it is a subject that people wanted to know about. I want to be able to provide a solution that people would be willing to pay for. I want to be able to write some basic information on the subject so that I could give away a free report as a supporting product to entice them to come back for visits, click on affiliate products and buy my ebooks or other products. I also chose my specific subject matter based on an e-book I am already writing. It seemed like a perfect match!

The other thing I did was to use the Market Samurai software to determine if my market was viable based on keywords. If you haven’t checked out Market Samurai yet, I’ve mentioned it before and you should definitely try out their free offer to see what it can do for you. It is what I have used in the past to come up with ideas for niche content website ideas and it’s awesome. I won’t go into full details on how to use the software here because the Market Samurai website has some really great video tutorials on their website that explain it all.

Now, I’m not going to tell you my subject just yet. I’d like to hear from you on what you are going to choose as your information topic first. What are you passionate about? What do you know a lot about and just can’t shut up about?

Creating information based websites is an obvious method for creating a passive income but in looking at my own I can definitely see a trend. I tend to ride high on it for a week or two and then I fizzle. I forget to put up banners or affiliate links, I don’t write new content and basically I just don’t use it the way I should. But this month I am motivated to do it right. I am starting from scratch with a new idea for an information website and I plan to make a blueprint of my activities for the entire month. My goal is create this new website and have it making money for me by the end of the month. Every weekday I will be doing something to make this new website work for me and I will try my best to keep up with updating it here so you can follow me on the project. After this first month and my blueprint for success is written in stone, I am going to go back into each of my current information based websites and revamp them to make them work and not just be a waste of space.

So will you join me?

One way to do this would be to make your free report readily available at your website and allow your website visitors the option to download your free report without even having to opt in to your mailing list. Though you may be hesitant about trying this, you have to remember that the more obstacles you put in the way of getting your report, the less chance people will have of obtaining the report and subsequently passing it on to others.

Another thing you don’t want to forget, is to include a statement in the report that clearly explains that people can pass the information along to whomever they choose. Just put a simple notice at the beginning and end of the report that states “If you found this report useful feel free to share it with a friend!” or “Please pass this valuable information to your friends and family!”.

If you make it clear that they can and should pass along your viral report, they will be more likely to do just that!