Online Business Update 1This website is my online business and is pillar #3 of my passive income strategy. I am sure you have come across hundreds of pitches about how make money online. To me it seems that they are just trying to make money off of me! My goal on this website is not to tell you how to become financially free, but to actually SHOW you how I am doing it - and to inspire you to do it yourself. This is the update on my progress with this online business thus far (as of March 2010). This website is built using a wonderful system called SiteBuildIt for building an online business. The basic idea is very simple and honest: create a website about something that you are passionate about, write great content that adds genuine value to the visitor, and then - and only then - find ways to make money from their visits ("monetize" in the parlance of online business). As you can probably tell, financial freedom is my thing. I am passionate about freedom in particular and financial freedom in general. So naturally I decided to create a website about it. Here's the time-line of how it all came to be: January 2009: I bought the subscription to SiteBuildIt. I spent a fair amount of time learning about the details, but I didn't do much in terms of actual production. April 24 to July 6, 2009: I decided that it wasn't going to happen without some external accountability. I decided to spend the tuition on SBI eLearning. It worked! It was very helpful to have the weekly classes. I also got answers to a few questions that had been sticking points for me. I got cranking. I got this domain name, registered it and started publishing in earnest. October 13, 2009: I published page #30 on the website! February 17, 2010: After a few months of not doing much (plus vacationing etc.), I checked the website traffic stats and they are much higher than I expected! Evidently I was doing something right to keep visitors coming. That's a very gratifying feeling and gave me added impetus to start working on monetizing said traffic. I start working on learning more about Google AdSense which gets mentioned a lot on the SBI Monetization HQ. The basic idea is simple: Google creates ads on the fly based on the content on your page. When a visitor clicks on an ad that catches their eye, the advertiser pays Google a certain amount of money, and a portion of that comes to you as commission. There is plenty of help on SBI! archives about how to add AdSense to the website. These two articles helped me a lot:
There is a lot to absorb there, but I realized that I needed to start adding first, and then tweak as necessary. In fact that seems to be the advice across the board when it comes to online business. February 28, 2010: I put up my first ad. I don't know what I was scared of, but it was very easy to sign up for AdSense and get code to cut-and-paste onto the pages of my website. March 4, 2010: I make my first AdSense commission. A whopping $0.50! March 11, 2010: I have AdSense on most pages. I have made $5.42 so far. Hey, this thing works! Onward and UpwardI also have links to my Amazon aStore on a few pages. Not much activity there. I will see how that goes. I might have to create a stand-alone page for the aStore and replace the aStore widgets with AdSense...I will report the commissions I make from this online business on my monthly newsletter (subscribe here). The bottomline? SiteBuildIt and SBI eLearning have worked out for me so far.
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