There are many ways to make extra money on the internet but let’s look at a hypothetical business going step-by-step from no on-line income to enjoying monthly residual income using just one of those ways.
First, capitalize on what you’re already doing. Since Emma had a coffee shop John told her she should start a blog about coffee–how to make various coffee drinks, the best coffee brands, anything interesting about coffee. But before she started her blog she needed to do keyword research to determine which words she should focus on or optimize in her blog. She picked the keyword “coffee drink recipes” and named her blog the same thing.
John taught her how to start a Wordpress blog and monetize it with Google Adsense. Google Adsense pays when someone clicks on an ad that is placed on your blog. Now Emma had two things to do each day to make her blog successful: first, she had to write a blog post every day and second, she had to drive traffic to the site.
Emma found the blog posts easy to write. Each day she’d take fifteen minutes to write about a favorite coffee recipe or about something funny that happened at the shop. The traffic driving, on the other hand, was a bit more challenging. First John showed Emma how to find and submit her RSS feed to various RSS directories. Next, John explained that they would work on establishing back links by creating Squidoo Lenses, HubPages, and writing Ezine Articles and linking back to her blog.
Emma was feeling overwhelmed. That was a lot of writing. “One article at a time” was John’s philosophy. So Emma decided to do one blog post per day, one Hub per week, one Lens per week, and one article per week. Emma worked her plan faithfully and within two months she was starting to see consistent traffic and a little income from Google ($100 per month).
Next John encouraged Emma to work her established (off line) customer base to drive traffic to her site as well. Emma got email addresses from her customers and began an autoresponder campaign offering coupons available only on her blog. Traffic grew and so did Emma’s Adsense profits.
Next time we’ll see how Emma implemented a second stream of online income.
Filed under Web 2.0, social media by Roz