Ready for the next assignment on the February challenge?

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!

Good to see ya! So you decided to join me did you? Awesome! As the opening day challenge our first step is the obvious…decide on the topic for your information based content website. There are lots of things to consider when choosing your topic but let me tell you what I based my choice on.

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?

I read several books in January about passive income including Multiple Streams of Internet Income and The Four Hour Workweek and I am definitely pumped for February. In fact I had planned on posting a February Challenge on Monday that I am hoping some of you might want to join me in, but life is busy this week and I didn’t get around to posting until this morning. So here we go for our challenge.

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?

Time for the month in review income report for January. I definitely slowed down on the article writing this month for eHow for a couple of reasons. First, January is a busy month for me at work. Lots of new projects come down the pipeline and that makes it hard to do anything. Second, I’m still wavering on eHow and if I will stick with it after having so many publishing issues and the UK issues happening. Third, I am working on my e-book and that has been my main concentration. That hopefully will be done by the end of February (I hope!).

So let’s take a look at what January brought!

Overall, I had an increase for the month (very small one) but not bad for slacking off of pretty much everything while I concentrate on my e-book. I literally did NOTHING to earn any of this $196. February should be better!

I must admit I am a little…no wait…I am GREATLY disappointed in the way eHow.com seems to be running their business. Back in December when I first started writing for them I had high hopes for being able to add them to my list of successful passive income streams and as of right now it still is, but they seem to be on a spiral downward and I’m not so sure there is a way back up for them. The latest UK fiasco seems to be pushing eHow writers towards leaving eHow and pursuing other article directories. So what exactly happened? Well, it would seem that eHow decided to clone eHow writer’s articles and make a UK version. So what’s the big deal? Writers can’t be paid for earnings through the Google Ad program that appear for the UK site! That means the writers aren’t being paid for the use of our articles. And to top it off, in many cases, the UK website articles are ranking higher than the regular US website version of the article. Writers are complaining of HUGE decreases in their revenue because of this. Just recently the community manager “Rich” posted a message on the forum telling writers that their articles will be removed from the UK site within a few weeks.

Come on now. I am a programmer and I can tell you that I am 99.9% sure that in their database they have each article on the UK site marked as either one of theirs or one of ours. It shouldn’t take weeks to bring those articles down. Assuming they have a programmer worth half a dollar working for them, he should be able to go straight into that database and deactivate all articles that don’t belong to them by writing a couple of lines of SQL. That’s complete hogwash eHow!

The end of the month is coming close which means I will be preparing my earnings for the month of January and even I am surprised I didn’t see much of an increase over last month. I haven’t yet decided if I will continue to write for eHow and am seriously considering removing my articles completely. Something to mull over through the weekend. What do you think about all of this?

A very poplar way of building up traffic to a blog, website or product page is to create “free reports” for others to download. You can really take advantage of this by making those reports viral and getting them to be passed along to others (and they pass it to others…and they pass it to others). So how do you get the snowball rolling on your free report and send it into viral oblivion?

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!