So, what do I mean by passive. I mean income derived by means during the month that I do very little or no work for. For me this is typically from sites I have built and do not have to maintain on a regular basis.

The key to creating a site that will earn passive income is to remember what both search engines and real people want. They do not want blogs written about topics that the author is not an authority on. I always think of it this way. When I had cancer in 1992, if I could have searched the Internet and found information that looked great but was not written by a real authority such as a researcher or physcian, how much trust would or should I have with it?

What does work for passive income is inventory for sale. And there are lots of places to get inventory, Amazon and Ebay are probably the top 2. The downside to a site of eBay or Amazon items is there is no original content. Right?  All it takes is a paragraph of good original content to solve that problem. I have designed several different sites to do this with, from WordPress sites with one good page of content to a custom site that builds the content dynamically. Personally I have had more success with the dynamic sites since the data changes which helps keep the search engine crawlers coming back.

If you can find streams of data that can help create a dynamic site, and add just a little original content, you have a winner. Both search engines and people will be happy as you are supplying something that is real and useful.

Hopefully I can find some time in the near future to work on some of the excellent new features in this version of WordPress. I did place a small menu at the top of each page, but you knew I just had to play with something.

They are not necessarily in any particular order.

1. TextPad
2. Firefox with FireBug extension.
3. Chrome Browser
4. Skype
5. Google Talk
6. Google Reader
7. Twitter
8. Facebook
9. WordPress
10. Email (Gmail)

As an extra mention, most of these are used on my desktop and my iPhone. I am still doing 99.9% of my work on an HP Mini 311 Verizon Netbook, which is simply amazing.

As an extra incentive to try the feature they are asking people to Tweet about it….

“And if you’ve customized your look with a fun personal photo we’d love to see what your new homepage looks like. Tweet a picture of your page with the hashtag #myGooglepage and share it with us!” Source : Official Google Blog

The new Google SearchWiki has some pretty cool features. Although changing page rankings will not affect everyones search results it is a great way to see the notes from everyone on any given page, and this just might become as important as the rankings themselves. 

Seeing live reviews of other pages will certainly have an impace how what pages I go to when conducting a search.

What are your thoughts?

However, there are several desktop applications that I have to install to be in my zone. I have been using each one of these for as long as I can remember. 

Sam Spade - Sam Spade is an integrated network query tool for Windows 95, 98, NT and Windows 2000. This tool allows me to keep several sites in the options as I am running traces, pings and whois calls.

Agent Ransack - Freeware graphical file searching that supports regular expressions for Windows. I keep a copy of all software I download, such as a copy of each WordPress Release. With Agent Ransack I can quickly find any reference to anything I am looking for in a very large file folder.

Process Explorer - Process Explorer, also known as procexp.exe, shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. If you want to know what is using up your resources on a Microsoft OS machine, this is the best way I have found. The biggest benefit to me is the ability to shut down and process without affecting the others.

TextPad - TextPad is an award winning text editor for Windows.  with powerful features that will increase your productivity. This is probably the most used tool I have. Everything I write or code gets passed through TextPad. There are so many features and reasons I could not possibly list them all.

Lynx Text Browser - Lynx is the text web browser. Recommended by Google to see what a site looks like to a Search Crawler. This package should be required of anyone who is working on website (blog) development. If you really want to know what it looks like, you have to check this out!

According to this error I received, Google Chrome is not a supported browser for Google Gmail?

If you find yourself answering the same question over and over in Gmail, you can just add a canned response and then set a filter to handle who the response gets delivered to automatically.

This is not the same thing as autoresponders, this is more fine tuned to a specific topic or person and not just an email address. Check out the blog post about it at New in Labs: Canned Responses

One thing I realized quickly, there is no obvious way to add a Canned Response?

You have to do it from a Reply window, once you activate it.

Select an email to reply to and there is a new option link to add a canned response.

The KISS Principle should also be modified for the Internet, here are some examples:

• Keep It Simple Social (Networking)
• Keep It Simple SEO
• Keep It Simple SEM

One of the things I have noticed over the last few years is how so many people have complicated things, especially in the SEO and SEM markets. It is not rocket science, Keep It Simple works!

Some of the most popular destinations have a very simple design. Sure its cool to have videos and flash and all the latest widgets, but there is a fine line that can cross your site over to a cluttered mess.

The ironic thing to me is that some of the worst designs are those of the MSM (Main Stream Media). They are trying so hard to give you everything on the front page it becomes a useless mess of content that is not navigable.

Keep It Simple,  be social, leave comments, make organic links to things that are relevant to what you are discussing.  If you are concerned with SEO, start with a basic design, the more elements that have to be crawled through, the more chance you have of having searches miss the important content that you spent your time developing.

KEEP IT SIMPLE !!

1. Why does a Social Media person need to be in a Corporate office?
2. Are we already painting ourselves into a corner with the term Social Media? 
3. When will Social Media intersect with the local presence of a company?