Dividend Days

For me, creating alternate income is a means to an end. I research dividend-paying stocks and invest as a means to create yet another additional source of income. This allows me the luxury of creating wealth with residual payments regardless if I happen work that day or not. Whether through investing or other means, this is the real crux of alternate income, generating money in such a way that you don’t have to work as hard as you do now, giving you the time freedom you desire to pursue your life’s interest.

In my continuing quest to find sources of said income, my brother and I decided to start up a small venture into online marketing. We wanted to target very small keywords with little competition that get a consistent number of searches on a daily basis (minimum of about 100 searches per day). Rather than creating a spam site with nothing but advertising links and crap that provides no value to anyone and is unlikely to generate revenue organically, we take a different approach. We’ll research a subject, consolidate information from various sources, and build a site out with that content.

With some luck, people will link to the site, and since there isn’t too much competition in that area, our search engine rankings will climb over the next few weeks. We’ve hit the top 5 in most of our sites so far for their targeted key phrase, and the rest still hit the top 10-20. We’ve started to get the process down to a more automated science in terms of gathering information, writing in a reader-friendly consolidated format, and uploading it to a small but pleasant to the eyes site.

So you want to start your own niche site do you? Well not to worry, here’s a short breakdown of how we go about it:

1. Brainstorm: We really only like to create sites that we have an interest in. It gets very boring doing factfinding and research into something you don’t care about. Passion and interest are what drives us to create good content, so that we provide something of value to our visitors whilst making some money on the side as well. Write down some topics, ideas, subject matter, and then go from there.
2. What’s it Worth?: Once we have an idea we like, we check out the value of a particular key phrase, find out whether the domain name is available, and get a rough estimate for number of searches and how much the niche is worth click wise. We like to stick to free tools for this, so check out wordtracker’s free keyword tool if you’re curious. Don’t take it is gospel, but it’s a place to start. Once we’re happy with the profit potential it’s time to start the building process.
3. Fact Finding and Site Construction: We create a unique look for each of our sites in terms of logo and color, but much of the site’s structure remains intact. Once the logo and site design is whipped up, it’s on to content generation. We’ll gather information from official sites, create FAQs, gnab specifications if necessary, then we put it all into the site design and put the site live.
4. Promotion: Once the site’s up and ready to go, we’ll submit a sitemap to Google, use the sites that already have a decent rank to link over to the new site, ensuring that it will be indexed and ranked more quickly. We’ll also comment in popular blogs on the topic, and build up links through other means like wikipedia (Under external links, though we’ve had mixed success, some people are crazy about deleting links in the links section, so don’t spam! If it gets removed oh well, if it stays it’s a great source of traffic).
5. Hope for Paydirt: The site’s up, our promotion is done, nothing to do now but watch the money to roll in…if it does in fact roll in.

It’s not a perfect system, but it has served us well so far. On average we’ve launched 1-2 sites each month, and we’re currently bringing in $4-$8.00 per day in adsense earnings. Not exactly jaw dropping, but I don’t need a homerun right away, singles will suit me just fine, as we’re building on our current income one block at a time.

Tags: Alternate Income, Make Money, making money online, making money online tutorial