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.

Once I get those corrected, I have yet another new venture to tell you about that I am working on. I think you will like it!

Along these same lines I think trying to get a guest speaker to come post an article on your blog would be a terrific idea! I am doing research on the search engine industry as we speak and hope to get a guest blogger within the next couple of weeks.

On a side note…as you are writing article and after article for your new niche content website, have you noticed that many of the articles could possibly make up an even greater e-book? Woohoo! I’ve started a collection of my own posts in an organized format based on an outline I have already made up. This outlines gives me ideas on what to write about and it keeps me organized for a future e-book I may wish to write.

So keep the ideas rolling and the articles posting! If you aren’t writing regularly, try to get in at least one article every week, preferably 2-3.

Ok so what’s the tally for February?

As you can see, this is the first time my income went down from a previous month but there is a reason behind it. The month of February (and January to be truthful) have been planning months for me. Yes I am still working on my e-book but I am also evaluating many other different avenues of passive income to check out. One of them which I am hoping to tell you about in the next week or two is taking up quite a bit of my time at the get go, but eventually should slow down to where my involvement is minimal.

My plan for March includes writing more for E-how, working more on my niche content websites, writing more of my e-book and of course this NEW project that I haven’t told you all about yet. But it’s coming, I promise.

Let’s jump right back into our websites and write another article today. If you need ideas, try to think of solutions you can solve for your readers. Head on over to Google.com and do keyword searches on your topic and see what others are talking about that relate to your topic. Remember to try and keep your article information rich, but also keyword rich (without being excessive about it).

Need more tips?

• Stay focused and on topic. You don’t want to confuse or lose your readers in your post.
• Be helpful and informative. Remember, you are trying to become an authority on the subject. Make sure you KNOW what you are talking about and not just guessing.
• Make sure to use your keyword in your post title. This will help identify the subject to your readers and help your rankings in search engines.
• Be sure to proof read what you write. Check for spelling and grammatical errors.

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?

We don’t want to just start throwing ads and links all over but we do need to get them in there. A lot of the decision as to where to put your affiliate links will depend on the layout of your blog. For example, on my blog I have some great space down the side that I will put three 125×125 square banners.  Each of these banners leads to an affiliate product that goes very well with my topic. But how do you get those to show up on your blog? Once again, we are using WordPress as the example and the easiest thing to do is to go back into the “Appearance” tab and click on Editor. Once in the Editor, this time you will look for the “sidebar” option in the list of files. If you are placing your ads in another location you will need to locate that file, but for this example I used the sidebar.  You may have to play with it a little but grab the code that the affiliate program gave you and copy and paste it into the sidebar file. Make sure you put it in a place that will make it appear where you want it to. You can even choose to use some of the “Styles” defined in the page already by taking some of the code from another section in the sidebar. Click the “Update” button to save your changes and check it on your live website. If something looks wrong, go modify the placement and try again.

If you are using a longer banner, you may want to include that in your header file and save the side space for a Google Adsense snippet (which we will cover tomorrow).

If you have a large selection of actual products and if you have tried them yourself you might also try posting a review of the affiliate product. This works well because your post is about the product specifically and should be filled with keywords that may help people find that product making it more likely to be found in search engines. Reviews also let you get in as many affiliate products as you can keep up with and of course keeps a running archive so it’s always available.

So go ahead and get some ads up on your website and start making money!

So what would be a good program to join? There is no straight answer but Amazon is a favorite of mine because they carry practically everything, but there are also some specific products sold by 3rd party companies that might benefit your site. For example, with UltimateWebsiteTrafficSecrets.com I plan on offering the TrafficSeeker program as an affiliate product. It only makes sense since it is a piece of software designed to get traffic to your website, relatively affordable and has a great commission structure. The key is the product needs to be related to your subject matter, preferably something you have used or tried so you can truthfully recommend it and it should have the best possibly affiliate payout you can find.

Get out there and research what programs will work for you and sign up today because some take a few days for an approval process. Tomorrow we will work on getting them worked into our website.

Happy Monday to everyone! We’re you plugging away all weekend on your article and meta tags? Ya sure you were, it was Super Bowl weekend! But it’s ok, life is all about fun so let’s just get back on track today and make this blog work for us.

Today I’m going to be submitting my own website to the major search engines. There are several ways of getting your website submitted to search engines including using a 3rd party piece of software or manually submitting your URL to the search engines directly.  As for me, I don’t have a ton of time in my busy days so I am going to choose the first method and grab my search engine submission software TrafficSeeker to get my submissions done for me in just a couple of clicks. You don’t have to use TrafficSeeker, any software will work, but I’ve used TrafficSeeker for a number of years and I’m comfortable in how to use it so there ya go.

The first thing we do is start up the software and create a new project. You can call yours whatever you want, I usually just stick to the domain names for my project names. Once you’re in the software, the first thing you want to do is enter your full URL in the “site url” box. Once that is done click the “extract settings” button and the software will automatically fill in all the other stuff for you based on your website meta tags. You are also going to need to enter in your “email” and “junk email” values as well. I have 2 emails setup for each of these. The regular email is one I check to click on links for confirmations and other important things. The junk email is an account I made up that just sucks in all the junk email that these submissions can generate. I highly recommend not using an email account you use often in the junk email field.

There are lots of things you can go in this software including some really fantastic page ranking reports, link popularity and other information you might find useful, but for now just select “features” at the top of the software and click on “submit” in the list. You can then select the “Wizard” button and just follow the prompts to get your website submitted. The first time around, I would select to submit to everything in the list, if for no other reason that to build some backlinks. Once you are finished and click the “Finish” button just sit back and watch it submit to all those other places on the internet. My window currently shows that it is submitted to over 1 MILLION places on the internet. Not bad for such a cheap submission software.

That’s all there is to search engine submission! Easy day huh? Don’t get too relaxed though because this whole week is going to be all about modifying our website so that it starts making us money. Just what we want! This week will be some work, but I find it rather fun so hopefully you will too.

See you tomorrow!