February was a crazy month for me…actually January was too. I have a ton of stuff going on with work, PurelyPassiveIncome, writing my e-book (which still isn’t finished) and dealing with a lot of personal life decisions. Life is hard! And yet this all leads to the reason why I am trying to build myself a passive income…to have the freedom to deal with all of this stuff and not stress about working or money while I am doing it.

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.

Remember when we wrote that first article? Well, I certainly hope you didn’t think that would be your only writing assignment! To really make your content niche website interesting for your readers, you need to keep adding content. You might decide to write every day or maybe you just post once or twice a week. Whatever it is, try to be consistent and post often if you can.

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?

Check in time. How are things going? What questions do you have and what have you had trouble with? By now you should have joined a couple of affiliate links and are ready to start adding those links to your website.

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!

Due to a major project at work and not having enough time to put on deodorant this morning I have to prolong today’s post until tomorrow. Ok, I’m kidding about the deodorant but seriously, tomorrow we are back on!

Today is an easy day for you. We get to surf the web for information. One of the easiest ways to start generating revenue through your blog is to set up advertisements, product reviews and links that lead to a link specifically made for you that lets you earn money off of every sale made through that link. This is called an affiliate link. You may not have any affiliate programs in your arsenal yet or you may have a ton. It doesn’t matter. Our goal today is to research affiliate programs that would go well with the topic of your website. Don’t worry about plugging them into your website quite yet, I will go over those instructions tomorrow. All we are interested in today is finding the programs, signing up for them and learning how they work.

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.