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.

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The other fact about online income diversification is that most people who are preaching and teaching how to make money online have other income streams that are not visible to their user base. This is not a derogatory statement, just a fact. Remember the old saying “I taught him everything he knows, I just did not teach him everything I know”, and why should they?

Don’t expect all income streams to be equal, each system just needs to be available and working. Remember,  not all systems work for all people. This is just simple logic, we are not all the same and do not have the same skill sets and personalities. 

My recommendation to anyone trying to make money online is to get something started and then begin looking for other avenues. And as you test other options do not pile all income streams on the same site!

The first 4 obvious choices most people see are:

• Google Adsense
• Amazon
• eBay
• Yahoo Publisher Network

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One thing I realized recently was that most of my search traffic comes from my older posts. However, I found myself doing the same thing as a lot of other bloggers, placing my contextual ads on pages and not considering these facts about who is visiting the pages.

Typically I would place contextual ads on most of my blog pages except for the home page, thinking that the loyal readers visited the home page and did not want to have those ads in their way. After taking a fresh look I discovered that was not the case.

The reality is most of the readers on a blog that are loyal readers read a post when it is fairly new, probably within the first 48 hours of it’s life cycle. So instead of placing ads based on pages, maybe it would make more sense to base them on time. I have changed my contextual ads due to this data, these ads will now show up on pages after 48 hours.

The idea is simple, keep it clean for the benefit of my loyal readers, while still taking advantage of the long tail search traffic.

Let’s see what happens!

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Oh, there is a catch….

I want to see profitable blogs that are not part of the whole blogging about blogging to show you how to make money blogging while talking about blogging and designing sites that are just intended to make money…about blogging.

Did that make sense?

To clarify this I will start by saying profitable is $100 a month. Yes I know, that is not that much money. But the whole idea is to find blogs that reflect a persons passion for a topic without being about how to make money from that topic.

I guess the question that would be asked might be; If you were not making any money, would that blog you are working on still be important to you?

If you know of any blogs/bloggers that fit this description, drop a comment here or let me know on Twitter

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After spending the last 20 years online in one form or another I can honestly say that there has never been another time that allowed us to make money so easy as there is right now on the Internet. Now having said that, I must also say that it is not as easy as some have come to believe.

I am not going to go through all the ways you can make money online, there are a thousand blogs out there that will do that for you. If you want a real condensed list I would recommend this Shoemoney video.

What I wanted to do today is tell you one thing. Keep an open mind.

Just because someone said this way or that way was good or bad is not enough reason to make your mind up on a system. And be willing to give things a second try. Something that did not fit you 2 years ago may now be a perfect match. As your time online increases and your knowledge evolves so do some of the systems you have experimented with in the past.

If you are really interested in online income, do not take things at face value and give them just 10 minutes of your time. There are no instant fixes. Yes, there are people who have had instant success, but most of those are cases that can not be duplicated due to a lot of factors. The word WORK should not be just another 4 letter word. But try to find the type of work that fits you, your style and your schedule.

Keep an open mind, every now and then go back and revisit things that you have looked at in the past.

You never know, that perfect online income source may be something you have overlooked or even tried before!

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The Good….

• You can change colors schemes and settings in your Adsense control panel and the changes will be reflected on your site live. No need to copy and past new code.
• There is an Import old Adsense Code function to convert your existing code.
• If an ad does not result in any pageviews in 7 days it will be marked as Inactive.

The Bad…

• There is a new variable called “google_ad_slot”, just not sure we need another tracking device. And it is not clear if you can cross these over domains, or you need to make a new ad for each Domain.
• It will be a lot of work to convert old pages to the new Adsense code.

The Ugly..

• The system is extremely slow when converting. Each new ad takes 10-15 minutes to show up on a page.

Read the official release at the Inside Adsense Blog.

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I have gone through waves when it comes to buying Domain Names. At times I have gotten on a binge and purchased several at a time. But the best practice I have found is to have a plan. Each month I take $10 to $50 of my online income and reinvest it in Domain Names. I also try to launch 1 new site each month with one of these names. I no longer worry about Domain Names I have purchased but not activated. The worst case scenario is I wasted $10 over a year.

If I purchase 24 domain names in a year at $10 each I have only invested $240. So all I need to double my money is to earn $460 over a year on just one of them.

Do you have a plan?

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This new Make Money Online page uses a real simple algorithm. It list blog post that have Make Money Online in the title and excludes any listing that is a comment or from Digg.

Click here for the new Make Money Online page.

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A few days ago I starting getting some strange results. I noticed at the same time that I was having indexing problems on my XP box and decided to wait and see if it cleared up with a reboot. I rebooted and tried a couple of other things with no luck. I fired off an email to their support to see what type of response I would get, and I must say I was pleasantly surprised. Within a short amount of time I received and email that there was a patch to solve any problems. All I had to do was run the update and it would be fixed, and that is exactly what happened.

Thanks to the team at Micro Niche Finder. Great product, great support and quick response time. Not sure there is much more you could ask from a software developer!

Product Link : Micro Niche Finder

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Link : YouTube Videos

There are a lot of limitations to what videos you will can currently play with this setup.

Basically it is either contextual or based on a YouTube category. It will be interesting to see how this progresses. I like the idea, but as usual with anything new there will be a lot of testing and adjusting to get a system that makes sense to the end user and satisfies Google’s plan for monetizing video.

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