Residual Income Web Blog

Wow.

I had high hopes but really did not expect to see my investment pay off so … quickly.

My Wealthy Affiliate membership, which I’ve been blogging about for the past week, has already paid for itself.

I spent $359 for access to the Wealthy Affiliate course and resources for a year (the price will more than double, forever, starting tomorrow) and, following their action plan, will more than make that back through affiliate sales from the past three days.

If I’d subscribed for the $39/ month plan, that one $39 investment would have earned itself back in spades even if I quit and never spent another hour on the site. For those on the fence about joining this incredible community of internet marketers, webmasters and online writers, I urge you to try it — just for one month — as it might be the best $39 you’ve spent all year.

While I first heard about Kyle & Carson’s membership site two years ago, I waited until now to join because I always had more work than I could handle and was trying to earn money without spending a penny — and I did. But my knowledge of affiliate marketing is a hodgepodge of what I’ve read and what I’ve experienced through my own trials & errors.

I make a few thousand dollars a month — which is amazing considering how few hours I really devote to it — but Kyle & Carson and their numerous success stories show much higher earnings than I can imagine achieving on my own.

For me, spending the money made sense — doubly so now that I’ve already earned it back after implementing only a fraction of the material in WA — as it furthers my goals to bring my online business to the next level.

Whether or not you purchase this particular resource depends on where you are and what goals you have. I wonder, if I’d joined two years ago, what kind of success would I be seeing already? But then I remember — the second best time to start is now. And I have.

I’m blogging about my Wealthy Affiliate journey as I go, to share what I learn along the way and perhaps give you ideas to use as you build your residual income, whether or not you decide to take the course yourself.

The day after I joined the WAU affiliate training course, I completed the first lesson and was notified I had to wait another two days before having access to the next segment. There was a list of extra things to do in the meantime, and I soon found myself browsing the Training Center. It was there, under Intermediate Resources, that I found a short guide on “Building a Mailing List.”

I’ve long known that an opt-in subscriber list is like gold for internet marketers. If you have a website on dog training, and an email list of visitors who are interested in dog training tips and resources, you can better market your website articles as well as dog-related products and services, to an interested audience. This is true for any niche across the web. For those who wish to receive them, your subject-specific newsletters can be a helpful resource. For you, it can be an opportunity to build credibility with your audience, as well as increase online income.

Typically, you wouldn’t work on building an opt-in subscriber list on day 2 of an internet marketing course. Most students are still learning the basics of internet marketing, unless like me they’ve already had some experience before taking the course. But since I already have blogs, websites and articles going, and am simply waiting to delve deeper into the meat of the course, seeing that simple guide was the motivation I needed to get moving on my subscription list.

A free service,  MailChimp, which is really very robust and actually quite cool, handles my subscriber list. My initial list is less than 300 contacts, all of whom opted-in in the past six months to receive my ebook updates, and it’s a good start. I have also created a newsletter subscription form which will import subscribers to my MailChimp account to help grow my list.

On day 3 of my WA course, I sent my first subscriber list email. In reaching out to my subscribers, I want to make sure  that my newsletters are first and foremost helpful and useful resources. We all hate junk mail and sales pitches, and I respect my readers’ time. I intend to only send information I’d be glad to receive myself. In addition to good content, links to helpful resources — whether or not I may receive a commission on them — will also be included, but only if I have tried them and believe them to be good and worth MORE than the cost.

Any tips on what you as a subscriber want to receive in a newsletter? If you have a website, do you have a subscriber list? What kind of updates do you send to your list?

My real adsense earnings for March 2010 were $271.01, representing my best month yet with Google Adsense. Most of those earnings, $202 to be precise, were from a single site — the pets-themed website I started about 15 months ago. It has less than 20 pages and most of those don’t yet rank very high in the search engines, but the few that do are bringing in a very respectable passive income month after month.

I’ve seen a steady increase in Adsense revenue this year. As a point of reference, December 2009 showed $123.34 from Adsense, with a nice jump in January 2010 to $169.88 and then February was $195.46. March’s earnings were a nice surprise at more than $75 above February, which had been a record month.

My goal is to increase my Adsense income to $1,000 a month by December of this year. To that end, I’ve been adding content to a few niche sites and securing backlinks to the new pages. One thing that’s been a challenge is figuring out the best way to grow my niche sites — do I focus on them one at a time, or get each of my 15+ domain names online and then add content and promote them assembly-line style? Going back and forth between these two strategies has kind of made my approach a little more haphazard than I’d like.

For now, I’ve decided my top priority is to get each one online with a decent template and five pages of content before adding more pages to existing niche websites or promoting what I already have online. I think it’s important for the sites’ future income that their age is established now — I’ve owned some domains for over a year and that’s a waste if they aren’t being put to use.

Once all of my sites have been established, I’ll add Google Adsense code and some affiliate products and start backlinking. Accomplishing this for each of my domains, and then adding more content to my well-earnings pets site, will help me reach my Google Adsense earnings goal by the end of the year.

How are your Adsense earnings? Do you have a goal for increasing them; if so, what’s your strategy?

Let’s face it: Links make the web go ’round.

More specifically, backlinks are the lifeblood of any content-based residual income.  For a webmaster, good backlinks  (links to his site, from other well-ranked blogs and sites on the web) are invaluable. No matter how good your on-site SEO (search engine optimization) is, your site will go nowhere without solid links to the content you have to offer.

If you already have good content and a well-organized site, but aren’t seeing the traffic or Google search results to match, the number one thing you can do is to build links to your main site page and to some of your best content pages within your site. Ideally, each and every page of content you publish online should have a good backlink pointing to it. After your website is well established and builds page rank (PR), simply linking to new pages from your index page or tier-2 page that also ranks well will be sufficient. But in the beginning, and periodically as rankings ebb and flow, you need to build solid links to your site, blog, or other online content.

One-way backlinks from well-ranked sites are considered high value backlinks. These are the best of the best and most valuable to you as a webmaster or content author. One-way means that the site links to you, but you don’t link back as you would in a link exchange. For example, if a high-ranked blogger or national news site linked to one of your content pages, you’d be in the money.

Keep in mind that the page rank of the page that links to you is important. Even if the parent site has good overall PR, it’s the page that links to you that “counts” for the value of the backlink. Therefore, simply linking to one of your sites from a Squidoo lens or an article on HubPages will not give you a top-level backlink reflecting the site’s overall popularity in Google — unless, of course, the article with the backlink is featured on the front page or otherwise builds its own high PR.

Another thing you have to keep in mind is that some sites block Google from following outgoing links, using the “nofollow” meta tag in their html code. I use nofollow tags on affiliate links on my blog, which is an appropriate use of the tag, but some sites use nofollow tags for virtually all outgoing links — eHow.com is one of them, so adding your site to the Resources section of an eHow article won’t help you build backlinks at all. If you’re confused, don’t worry, I’ll keep it simple: everything I link to in this article allows dofollow links at the time of this writing.

Since my focus for 2010 is to build income through my niche sites and blogs, creating plenty of backlinks is a top priority. Here’s what I suggest for building backlinks, based on what I’ve read and am experimenting with myself:

• First and foremost, give people (specifically, webmasters and bloggers) excellent content they will want to link to naturally. Not every post you write is going to be amazing, but articles that are compelling, informative, helpful, or innovative will attract some attention.
• Guest blogging. While it takes time to write a quality blog post for someone else’s site, the ability to include a link to your own blog or website can be very valuable. Network with bloggers in your niches to find these opportunities, or they may come knocking as has happened to me in the past.
• Submit articles to blog carnivals (these are typically only good for blogs, not static articles on a niche site). Most require commenting turned on, and some require that you link back to the published carnival in a timely fashion — which is good blog carnival etiquette, anyway.
• Host blog carnivals and require that participants link back to your site.  Publish the carnival monthly to ensure a steady flow of links to your site. Weed through carnival submissions to make sure you are only giving links to quality content.
• Add articles to content sites, especially revenue-sharing content sites that will pay you a little (or sometimes a lot) over time in addition to the value of your backlink. I recommend HubPages, Squidoo, and InfoBarrel.
• Utilize content blogs, such as Jevitt and Snipsly, by setting up an account, entering your Google adsense publisher ID for additional revenue, and publishing relevant blog posts with links to your sites.
• Submit articles to article directories, including EzineArticles, GoArticles and ArticleVolcano.
• Bookmark links to content on SheToldMe, LinkVault, and Redgage.

To manage backlink building effectively, I plan to devote one work session a week (ie a few hours) to building backlinks to my niche websites, blog posts, and eHow articles. And then, I’ll backlink to the backlinks.

Do you build backlinks to your content? What’s your strategy?