A good example of a website like this is a forum. Once a forum is established and up and running, it builds content itself. This increase page view which increases the likely hood of someone clicking on a link hence earning an income with something like Google Adsense. So using that realization I’ve now created a site I hope will one day will create a passive income with minimal input. Initially I considered a forum and whilst a forum is a great way to build content, you need a way to draw people to the forum in the first place. What I decided is I need a website that allows people to input content and draws people to it by it’s very nature.

There is lots of these sites out there. TinyURL and pastebin are a great example of two of these. People  use these website without even considering the adds on them. They generate pages based on user content slowly earning an income. Hence the next attempt to build a passive income is http://www.somewheretowrite.com. A simple site where people can write their thoughts, feelings.. pretty much anything. As of writing there’s already been a few posts by completely random people. There’s no adds on the site at the moment. But I’ve used some specific keywords to try and target a higher link rating hence a more likely hood of people using and finding the site. I’ll give it 3 months and all going well will add adsense pages to the site.

So if your thinking about a passive income from the web, think about a site where your users are the content generators. They build the site content, hence grow the site which benefits both them and you!

Sounds simple enough and there is a number of great programs out there that make affiliate marketing a breeze. However, the more you read, the more you discover there is a set sequence to create a website which ends up being profitable with affiliate marketing.

The steps, as nicely writting up in a document from sitesell.com (http://www.ezau.com/dl/AffMasters.pdf) seem to be:

1. Work out a topic your interested in which is a niche area
2. Work out targeted keywords to the topic your interested in
3. Work out your competition and affiliates for the topic your interested in
4. Register a domain name & start building your website using search engine optimised (SEO) methods
5. Promote your website via back links

Sounds simple really. Though in practice it must take a lot of time.  I can see how once you have high traffic to a site and GOOD content you get visitors. Clearchain for instance slowly has seen traffic increasing and likewise the amount of clicks and therefore revenue increase – and Clearchain isn’t even designed to be a niche site, more a blog of various things that the people of Clearchain work on.

Hence it’s now time to try out the info I’ve read. Introducing WattsitUse.com, the niche site related to evaluating anything power related.

It’s been a while since my last blog post on making money online but it doesn’t mean I’ve not been thinking about how to do it. Past blog articles have indicated some ways to make money online but never really talked about how effective the various methods are. Well this blog article talks about one method that apparently most people who try and make money online use initially. That is Google Adsense.

Why is it the first method people use? Word of mouth seems to be the main reason – after all that’s the reason I decided to try it. So what is Google adsense? It’s simply a means provided by Google to allow them to advertise on your website. If you look at this website you’ll see a number of Adverts. At the time of writing most of these are provided by Google Adsense.

Adsense provides a nice friendly interface to being able to setup and configure how and what type of advert you can see on a website. It allows you to chose the size colours and a few other things about the adverts. Once you’ve selected what you want you get provided with some special html code that must be put on any web page you want adverts to display on. Below is a sample of the code provided by Google:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-8063328086245449";
google_ad_slot = "2786071329";
google_ad_width = 728;
google_ad_height = 90;
//-->

The result of this code is something like the below image (which is the top advert on this website)

Once adverts start appearing on your website, you slowly start to earn money. What adverts get shown I hear you asking. Well Google scans your website and picks adverts which are relevant to your site’s content. They even target the ads on a per-page setting. Which is really quite good as adverts relevant to a page are more likely to get people to click on them.

You see Google pays for two things:

• PPC – Pay per Click
• PPV – Pay per view / PPI Pay per impression

Pay per view or pay per impression means you get paid to have the advert simply shown on the website. Pay Per Click means you get paid if someone clicks on the advert. Pay per click is by far the more profitable of the two. However depending on your website audience, pay per view is more likely than pay per click.

At this point you might be thinking – wow I get about 300 visitors a day to my website, if they each view a page that’s say 300cents. If only that was the case! The reality is PPC and PPV don’t pay much. You generally only get fractions of a cent for each. Clearchain for instance has been runing these adverts almost since it was setup. The results – well as you learn more about how things work, you setup more and you also make more web pages hence earn more. Below you can see a snapshot of the income from Clearchain.com using Adsense.

As you can see the income certainly isn’t staggering but small amounts all add up. The April figure is based on 3302 impressions and 13 clicks. Clearchain also doesn’t get a lot of traffic hence if you had a website which got lots of traffic then you could potentially get quit a nice income.

So Adsense is certainly one way to make money on the web. If you have a website with lots of content, and lots of visitors – try Adsense as it does work, just not as fast as you’ld expect. It won’t make you a millionaire over night, well at least not in my experience. Though if you checkout some blogs there is certainly some big money earners in Adsense.

Online Money Ideas

1. Advertising
2. Affiliate Programs
3. Selling Items on Ebay/amazon/own shop frontend/etc
4. Creating a online book and selling it
5. Scamming people to make money (not a method I intend to follow)
6. Reselling services (webhosting, domains, books, advertising, etc)
7. Join a pay per click program
8. Start a blog (Hey, I’m already making ooodles – Not!
9. Do design/coding/write articles for someone else & get paid
10. Share trading / money trading

Each of these method have advantages and disadvantages. With setup costs raging from zero to quite a lot, likewise risk varies from zero – low – high.

In the end, Ideally I’m looking at ways that are low risk, low setup cost and reasonable returns. What option actually provides this set of features I’m not yet sure.

First a little background. My name is Benjamin Close, I have a good day job working as a Research Associate in the Wearable Computer Lab at the University of South Australia and a secondary job working as an System Admin for SecureEhosting with hobbies working on FreeBSD and Freedesktop. I earn a middle income 5 figure salary, am married to my beautiful wife Carly. We have no kids at present though we think of our pets (2 Golden retrievers, 2 cats and 2 fish) as our kids, and are in the process of building our dream home on a 16 acre block of land at Gould Creek, South Australia.

So why try and make money online? Well there’s an old saying:

“A wealthy man is one who doesn’t have to work for their living”

Or in other words, one is only truely wealthy when they don’t have to go to work to pay the bills, put food on the table, etc. Many call this retirement. Though the truth is we would all love to be in the position to not have to work. At present we have a mortgage, bills etc. We are content/happy people. Though there is always the worry (especially with the current global recession happening) that things could be much more unfriendly.

Whilst we both have income protection, it’s limited to injury not loss of a job. Losing our current jobs would be very hard to deal with. With the aim to have children in the not too distant future, this is something that we are going to have to deal with regardless.

Hence the reason for trying to make money online is two fold:

1. To supplicant the current income stream
2. To eventually replace the current income stream

I don’t expect this path to be smooth sailing, certainly nothing like the get rich schemes. Though I do believe with some hard work it is very possible. So feel free to read this category of my blog and track my progress if you want as I’ll be writing about everything I learn along the way. I don’t intend to be an expert at this (my previous tinkerings with Google Adsense has earnt me $100 in about 2 years – more on this later) and there will lots learnt along the way.