Matthew Allen

[Dumb] Passive Income Report for October 2013

November 15, 2013November 12, 2013 by Matthew Allen

Welcome to my [Dumb] Passive Income Report! This blog is all about what I am doing to create several different passive income streams. This monthly income report details my results. I work very hard and dedicate many hours each week to working on my different online endeavors in an attempt to create passive income. So why do I consider it passive income then? Because I am not trading specified amounts of time for a predetermined amount of money like I do at my day job. Most of the income you will see in this report results from work I have done in the past.

Why am I sharing my income publicly? Hopefully to gain credibility with you (the readers) and to maintain a certain degree of accountability for myself. I could blog all day long about what I am doing to create passive income online, including some of my unique strategies. But why would anybody trust me and believe that what I am doing works if I don’t prove it by sharing my results? This is what I mean by gaining credibility and this is one of the main purposes for sharing my income. I also share my failures on the blog, which holds me accountable. Knowing that I will be publishing a monthly income report will keep me motivated to keep pushing forward and plugging away on the things I need to do to create future passive income.

The Carnival of Money Pros

July 2, 2014November 9, 2013 by Matthew Allen

I got an email earlier this week informing me that I was scheduled to host the Carnival of Money Pros on my site this week. I honestly had no idea that I even signed up, so I was a little confused. I did some checking and figured out that I did indeed sign up to host this carnival on a site of mine that is no longer active. Oops! The site I had intended to host the carnival on was a niche blog I was working on and trying to build a community around @ payoffcreditcard.net – I stopped working on that site and haven’t published any new content since April 2013. It gets almost no traffic at all and the site statistics are dismal at best.

To be fair to everybody who has submitted to this weeks carnival, I’ve decided to post it here on Dumb Passive Income. This site has better stats, more authority and some actual traffic – compared to the site I originally signed up with. I think this will be good for everybody involved. Plus, it’s a perfect opportunity for me to explain to my audience what a blog carnival is and how to use them.

Outsourcing Content for Cheap – How I Paid Only $76.66 for 40 Articles

July 23, 2015November 7, 2013 by Matthew Allen

Post updated October 18, 2014…

Note: There are several mentions and links within this article to Odesk. Odesk is now known as UpWork – so any links that previously led to Odesk now lead to Upwork.com. The platform is essentially the same.

You are not misreading the title for this post! I didn’t add a zero to the number of articles by accident and I didn’t forget a digit in the cost. Last month I did in fact get 40 articles produced for me from various writers and the total cost was only $76.66! Each article is 500 words minimum and is written according to my specific instructions for where and how to include specific keywords. The quality of the content turned out to be perfectly acceptable for what I wanted to use it for. I wouldn’t consider it to be excellent quality, but great for secondary articles on some of my niche sites. My intentions for these types of articles is to target very low competition keywords that get a decent (lower) number of searches, with the goal of attracting more search traffic to my sites. In this post, I’m going to show you exactly how and where I get articles outsourced for such a low price. I’ll show you every detail, including how I attract the writers and exactly how I instruct them to write the posts.

Passive Income Report for September 2013

October 7, 2013 by Matthew Allen

Welcome to my (Dumb) Passive Income Report! This blog is all about what I am doing to create several different passive income streams. This monthly income report details my results. I work very hard and dedicate many hours each week to working on my different online endeavors in an attempt to create passive income. So why do I consider it passive income then? Because I am not trading specified amounts of time for a predetermined amount of money like I do at my day job. Most of the income you will see in this report results from work I have done in the past.

Using Keyword Research to Grow Your Blog – Everything You Need to Know

January 22, 2020September 27, 2013 by Matthew Allen

If you are a blogger and you aren’t taking advantage of keyword research and simple on page blog post optimization to grow your blog – you are missing the boat big time right now! Can you grow your blog without keyword research and search engine optimization? Of course. But why not learn to do some simple keyword research and a few easy optimization techniques to keep that targeted traffic flowing to your blog month after month after month.

I’ve actually written quite a bit on this site, in the past, about using keyword research for blogging. I’ve been using these techniques and tactics myself and seeing positive results. I have a background in both blogging and building niche sites – so I understand the power of utilizing good keyword research and optimization techniques quite well. In this post, I am actually going to bring together everything I’ve written in the past and create kind of an ultimate guide to using keyword research to grow your blog. I also want to explain why I believe that bloggers should be using keyword research for their own advantage – now more so than ever before!

Plus – to keep it interesting, I’ve actually reached out to several others in the internet marketing space who I know have extensive experience with keyword research. I wanted to get their thoughts on using keyword research for blogging. A few of them are big names that you will recognize, and a few you might not recognize. I’ve sprinkled their contributions throughout this post.

Current State of Google – Niche Sites vs Blogs

September 20, 2013 by Matthew Allen

Have you been paying attention to the state of Google? Which way is the wind blowing today? Which types of sites is Google giving precedence to? What should I be doing to get my site to rank highly in Google? Why was my site ranking highly yesterday and it completely fell off the radar today? What did I do wrong or right? What the hell is Google doing? What are they going to do next? Does anybody know?

Most of these questions are great mysteries. SEO geeks are constantly trying to solve them and sometimes they do… for that day. And then it all changes again. The trick to keeping up with Google and all of their changes is to stay on top of the game and try to keep up to date as much as possible. Read the SEO blogs. Keep up with current case studies done by others. Figure out what used to work, what is working now, and what appears might work well into the future.

Passive Income Report for July and August 2013

September 6, 2013September 5, 2013 by Matthew Allen

A Backlinking Strategy Experiment for a Small Niche Site

August 22, 2013 by Matthew Allen

In June of this year I published an article explaining my specific backlinking strategies for niche sites. In it I admitted my dislike for having to do backlinking tasks but also acknowledged the need to do them. I highlighted and linked to some of the stuff I had read recently about link building – stuff written by some of the leaders in the internet marketing and niche site building space. I concocted my own customized link building strategy based on stuff that was working for others. I even set up spreadsheets for each of my current niche sites in order to keep myself on track. The purpose for the spreadsheets was to act as kind of a check off list for each of my backlinking tasks. It has now been about two and a half months since I published that post. Would you like to know how it is working out for me?

How to Increase Traffic to Your Website with Viral Image Sharing

August 6, 2013August 6, 2013 by Matthew Allen

We’ve all heard or seen of examples of where something has “gone viral.” Has it ever happened to any of your content or images? You may be thinking, why would it ever happen to me? The type of content I produce will never go viral. Well, you just never know. By simply adding a catchy, provocative, funny, interesting, ridiculous, [insert adjective here] image to your post and giving readers an easy way to share it – your boring old content actually could go viral. In this post, I’m going to show you how to increase traffic to your website with viral image sharing. I’m also going to show a very specific example of how this worked on one of my small niche sites. Plus, I’m going to share with you some tools and resources that I use to increase my chances of getting viral traffic through image sharing.

Bookmarking Sites and Social Networks – Getting Links for Niche Sites

November 28, 2016July 31, 2013 by Matthew Allen

Getting links from bookmarking sites and social networks is pretty easy. Any post from any site can be submitted by any person at any time. The question is this: how valuable are these types of links? I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert and tell you that I know. Does anybody even really know exactly how much weight Google gives to these types of links? The general consensus is that they don’t hold a lot of weight when it comes to ranking sites for specific keywords in Google. The other general consensus feels that social signals and these types of links are becoming ever-more important and are a bigger factor when it comes to Google rankings.

My personal feeling is that they can’t hurt. Links from bookmarking sites and social networks have to send some sort of positive signal to Google. They tell Google that the content is worth sharing and/or saving for later reference. Usually, this means that the content has some sort of value – which is something you would think Google somehow works into their algorithm. Google wants their search results to display the best and most relevant content. They want searchers to find what they are looking for on the first page. This means that Google wants the best information from the best sites displayed in the top 10 for the respective keywords. If content built around a certain keyword is bookmarked and shared a lot, this could be a signal to Google that this particular content is valuable and should get a boost in the search results.

Passive Income Report for April, May & June 2013

August 11, 2013July 18, 2013 by Matthew Allen

How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog – Proof that Keyword Research Works

June 15, 2013 by Matthew Allen

This is kind of an interesting post that I’ve been thinking about writing for quite some time. I actually have some proof that the keyword research for blogging strategies that I talk about for how to drive traffic to your blog really do work! Although I didn’t do it on purpose, a perfect opportunity presented itself when I didn’t publish any new content on this site for an entire month. I published a post on May 6th of this year, and then didn’t publish the next one until June 7th. The funny thing is that I did something almost identical on my old money blog almost exactly a year ago. I stopped publishing over there to concentrate my efforts over here on my new blog. I just took a look at my Google Analytics account for each site and compared some statistics. The differences for similar time periods are kind of astounding. Admittedly, I knew nothing about keyword research or SEO when I was trying to grow my old money blog. I did do everything else I could think of to try to drive traffic to that blog. When I moved over to this blog, I made the conscious decision to NOT go out of my way to promote it but to only let it grow organically. Check out my results…

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