Making money online is quite a challenge but I don’t think it differs from making money from any other company. Some people think it’s best to work for a company and not worry about any other stuff but their own job. It is a defendable point of view but you will never get out of the rat race like this ;-(. On the other side, it requires a lot of talent and other thing to make money online blogging or from any other kind of website.

Patience and beliefs!

When I first started blogging 2 years ago, I read a lot about how to make money and how to make your blog grows. As a matter of fact, I strongly suggest you read The Simple Dollar 31 dtips for a better blog series. This really got me started in my online adventure.

Most people that wrote about making money online and blogging will talk about patience, but I think it’s way more than only being patient to see your site rises. I think it has to do with faith and beliefs! Being patient and hoping to get some traffic is one thing; however, what really put your blog on the map is your faith and beliefs in yourself. When I started, the first 5 months nothing happened. I was thrilled to get 10 visits a day! (4 of them was myself ). Starting to work online will ask you to put hours and hours of your time without any results. This is a very long learning curve. However, when you start going up, it never goes down and the curve can really bring you to the top!

Technical skills

If you don’t know how to work your way out of html code and php, you might find your online journey a bit harsh. However, I am a proof that a computer idiot can succeed blogging! I also have to admit that my friend and partner has good technical skills and he does everything on that side -)

The good news is Wordpress is there to solve most of your problem by providing plug-ins and a user friendly environment. You can actually do most of the job by yourself while reading a few articles about what you want to achieve.

Marketing skills

Blogging is not enough. Most people say that content is king and they are right. However, if you only write good content and you don’t show it to the world, you’ll end up being a goddamn good writer and your wife will be proud of you… but she will be the only one You need to open yourself to communities. Comment on other blogs, send emails to other bloggers, make friends online. This will bring you a lot both on your blog/website than personally. In order to be noticed by Google and other search engines, submit your stuff to blog carnivals, ezines and social bookmarking sites. However, don’t expect any instant results. Just draw yourself a marketing plan (and I’m not joking about the plan) and stick to it.

Curiosity

This is not always talked about when you read about starting a blog and making money online. But I can tell you that curiosity is probably what will bring you to another level of webmaster. By reading about what is hot right now, looking at marketing tools used by other bloggers and getting ready to replicate it, you will be able to make your blog grow even bigger.

Consistency

Working hard is good. But working hard on a steady basis is the secret of all businesses. Write down a weekly plan and do whatever is on your list as it would be your main job. Blogging once in a while is fun but will never bring any cash home.

I think we did some great things during that week of hard labor. I will probably feel the benefit of all of this in fall but it is a long term project. While I have still a lot to learn about making money online, I hope that I inspire or help some of you to reach your goal! If you have more questions, send me a shout:

Thefinancialblogger at gmail dot com.

Good luck with all your projects!

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We are already on day 4 of our adventure and I must say that I am quite impressed about what we have done so far. While we are not directly making money (we are actually spending a lot on design, logos and servers ), I am quite sure we will earn the fruit of our labor next spring! This will definitely become a great source of passive income!

On the other side, doing such project (taking a week off to work on your own projects), requires a lot of preparation and discipline. We talked about doing so about 3 months ago and we started to think about what should be done during that week for two months.

Do it as you would be paid to do so

Working in jeans with my Starbucks has nothing to do with chilling on a Sunday morning while watching the news or the latest news (as our Montreal Canadiens Coach was fired on Monday!). While it does sound like it’s cool, we really have to work. I’m actually putting as much effort as I would if I was paid by my employer. After all, it will become a great source of passive income later on!

While preparing that week, we started with a brainstorming. We were sending an excel sheet with all our ideas related existing sites or about the one we would like to create. We were exchanging the excel sheet by email every two or three days. The one with the document had to add something on it before sending it back with a time delay. Therefore, we were constantly thinking about what we should do. In my MBA, they call that strategic planning ;-).

Then, we met for 2 hours and we discussed all our projects. We thought about the time and resources required versus what it could bring us in the future in term of passive income. We wanted to manage our time properly as 5 days of work is not much when you want to build an empire LOL! Seriously, on that day, we picked our favourite projects and started to draw our schedule.

In order to be efficient, we separate tasks according to our experience and efficiency. This is why I am not doing coding, while I write a lot this week ;-). We split our day in two parts (morning and afternoon), selecting project that requires more or less 3 or 4 hours of our time. We also made sure to align both schedules to make sure one was not waiting for the other to complete a project. A key success of our partnership is that we both have very different but complementary competencies. Therefore, it requires a lot of planning to make sure we work together and we are ready at the same time.

Each morning, we have a chat of 15 minutes about our day and how we will do things. We review our schedule to make sure it all make sense and that we are on time. Then, we plug in our ipod and start working… next break: lunch time! We take another 20-30minutes to talk about what has been done and then we keep going. After all, building passive income has nothing to do with being passive

If we have to talk to each other at another time, we send an email. Then, we don’t waste time talking about other and more important topics such as the hot girl that just walk by… just kidding ;-). More seriously, it is very important to stay focus and to achieve our goals. Every minutes lost is money wasted… time is money, remember?

So regardless which kind of sideline you want to do, you must prepare yourself and think about all the possibilities before starting anything. If you are looking to create an alternative source of income, I suggest you read this series:

How To Create An Alternative Source Of Income Part 1

How To Create An Alternative Source Of Income Part 2

How To Create An Alternative Source Of Income Part 3

How To Create An Alternative Source Of Income Part 4

How To Create An Alternative Source Of Income Part 5

How To Create An Alternative Source Of Income Part 6

How To Create An Alternative Source Of Income Part 7

How To Create An Alternative Source Of Income Part 8

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I talked about my company and the passive income coming from it to a few people since its creation. However, most people have absolutely no clue how I can really make money from writing articles everyday. They imagine that I probably do this only for fun and that this hobby is giving me $200 a month. But there is much more than simply blogging. Way much more. This is probably why it is so hard to earn money off the Internet and why so many people quit. Building a passive source of income is not that easy

It’s like investing in a rental property

I like the analogy with a rental property because it is a similar type of source of passive income. If you are looking to buy a rental property, you will probably pay around 10 to 15 times the yearly gross income (this is the rate in Montreal and its suburbs). So if you are making 1,000$ a month (so 12K a year) from renting, your property worth about 120K to 180K. You will get a steady (passive) income flow and you will have to take care of the property in the mean time.

You will probably have to invest in the property once in a while to repair something, to maintain its value or to improve your investment returns by renovation a bathroom in order to increase your rent. On the other side, you may have months where your renters don’t pay you or that one of your apartment is vacant. During these rougher times, you still have to pay off your mortgages, taxes, electricity and other expenses related to your property.

In fact, there are no real passive sources of income as you always have to work a little bit for it. I personally define passive income as a source of income earned regardless if I am awake or not, on vacation or available.

How about investing in a website to build passive income?

When you buy an existing website, you will usually pay for 12 to 24 times the monthly income. Therefore, if the website is making $100 a month, chances are that you will pay less than $2,000 for it. Once the domain is transfer under your name, you will start earning income from this website. On the other side, you will have to take care of it at the same time.

You have the possibility to invest in the website to increase its traffic, improve the design or add a forum for example. All these actions will contribute increasing your monthly income from it. As it is the case for a rental property, you may have rougher months where you loose sponsor, get dropped by Google and so on. However, the only “municipal tax” there is to pay is your server ($75 in our case) and your domain (about $10 a year).

Therefore, you have way less risk as your monthly expenses are not very high and you see a direct return on your investment. For examples, we bought a blog that was generating a little bless than $100 a month for $1,200. In 4 months only, we were able to monetize the blog so it’s almost paid off ($1,000 revenue so far).

Want another example? The latest site we bought early in January 2009 was what I call a “mini-site”. Mini-sites are designed for a specific niche in order to get highly targeted individuals. They don’t have 10 to 30 articles on them, all related to the very same topic. We bought the site at $1,300 and we already made $325 in two months. At that rate, we will be paying it off in 4 months. Once paid, it will still bring us a stead cash flow. Who cares if it drops down to $100… it is still $1,200 per year for minimum efforts ;-). This is what I call building passive income!

We would not be able to keep too many blogs. This is why we decided to go on different route and try mini-sites as they require much less work. So even if you don’t now how to create a site from scratch, you always have the possibility to buy one already built

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For the very first time since the history of The Financial blogger, I am writing my post live as I don’t have any articles written for this week! So here I am, Monday morning, in the bus to Montreal, writing on tomorrow’s post. I just survived my MBA exams and I must say it was quite a ride this time.

I am quite excited (and exhausted!) this morning as I am doing something very different than the other day. I still woke up at 5h30 and I am still in a bus heading Montreal as usual. However, I do not wear a tie nor a suit… Jeans and t-shirt for this week! Can I walk in my branch dress like this and meet clients? Nope! I said I was doing completely different today; I took a week off to work on my internet company.

Since I have more days of vacation than my wife, my partner and I decided to take a full week to work on our stuff. We have been planning this project for 2 months now. As we certainly didn’t want to simply hang around, drink beer and play on our computers, we created a complete schedule for the whole week.

You actually won’t notice any difference on this blog (a part from the fact that I will be writing about what we are doing this week), however, we will work on different other “mini-sites” that may become as big as TFB one day.

When I started blogging 2 years ago, I thought I would be able to earn money from the web. Most people told me (and still believe) that it is almost impossible and that I would be lucky if I ever earn $500 a month out of blogs. The truth is that we are now earning more than $500 with TFB alone and we have several other projects on the side.

After 12 months of activity (we started our company on March 2007), M35 is now paying for a few bills such as internet and my black berry and I was able to go to a Spa during the Holidays. I also recently received a 5% dividend (based on my initial investment from last year). Not bad when the market is plunging, huh?

During this week, we will try to do several things including:

- optimizing our existing websites in term of traffic and monetization

- creating a weekly schedule we will follow during the upcoming year for promotion and content creation

- creating new websites and resources for readers

- thinking about our future projects and acquisitions

It’s funny because I am actually going to work the whole week, without pressure and I will probably have a blast doing it. I was recently writing about the rat race and how I want to get out of it.. This is a good example of how! So this week only, I’ll write about my web projects and tell you a little bit more about what we are doing, our hopes, our successes and our mistakes.

If you liked this articles, you might wan to sign for my FULL RSS FEEDS. Then, you will get my daily post to your email and can read it at any time. To subscribe CLICK HERE

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