Matthew Allen

Income Report – July 2012

August 1, 2012 by Matthew Allen

Welcome to my first ever income report here on Dumb Passive Income. I’ve been hesitant to start doing these as my online income is sporadic at best. It might be another month or two or three before I have another net positive month, but I decided to start my monthly income reports nonetheless.

There are several reasons I decided to start sharing my side hustle income on this blog:

This is my favorite part of the month in the blogosphere. Several bloggers and other internet entrepreneurs share their monthly income and expense reports and I always seek them out and read them. People are naturally curious about how others are doing, so I figured I would join in on the fun and help satisfy the curiosity of others.
Income reports serve as proof. This blog is ultimately about how to create passive income (the dumb way). If I share exactly how much money I am earning and spending, people who read this blog will have proof that what I am doing is or is not working.
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The State of My First Two Niche Sites

July 26, 2012July 25, 2012 by Matthew Allen

In my little world of internet entrepreneurship, a lot is happening. Considering the time that I have to spend on this side hustle, I am starting to get some things accomplished. My most recent schedule change at my day job leaves me with just under 2 hours each day to do whatever I need to do on my computer. I get up at 5:30am every day and have until about 7:15 to work on my computer. In this time I conduct several forms of research, including: keyword research (the dumb way), online income and how to build niche sites research (mostly by reading other blogs), learning how to use WordPress research (playing with new themes and plug-ins) and whatever else I happen to stumble across. When I am not doing that stuff, I am trying to actually get some work done on my sites and this blog. If you haven’t figured it out by now, I try to get at least one post up on this blog per week. Since I am not really trying to make money with this site right now, I find it more important to work on my other sites.

Keyword Value Estimation

July 19, 2012July 18, 2012 by Matthew Allen

Estimating how much a keyword might earn for you if you created a niche site around it can be tricky. You have to work with a set of assumptions and guesses and then plug those numbers in with actual numbers provided by Google. First of all, you need to assume your niche site is going to make it to the first page of Google’s search results. If you can’t make this assumption, then you shouldn’t be building the site at all! Next, you need to guess where on the first page your site might land. Being up at #1 yields a ton more clicks thru than if you are down towards the bottom. The last assumption or guess that you need to determine is the click thru rate, or conversion rate for whatever your monetization method is. Google tells us the number for average monthly searches on particular keywords, and also the average cost per click that advertisers pay for that keyword.

Guessing Your Visitors per Month

Click thru rates for sites on the first page of Google seems to be an ever-changing phenomenon. The latest study I could find indicates that the top 3 spots in Google get 18.20%, 10.05% and 7.22% respectively.

Keyword Research the Dumb Way

July 11, 2012July 10, 2012 by Matthew Allen

Sticking with the theme of the blog, I need to tell you about some dumb things I’ve done when it comes to keyword research. I thought I had it figured out. I thought it was pretty simple. As it turns out, I was doing more than one thing wrong!

Until recently, I didn’t even properly or completely understand what a keyword was. I knew it had to do with the basic subject matter of content and that it was important for search engine optimization (SEO). In the past, when I had to fill out a form for keywords to an article, I would separate every single word with a comma. I didn’t know that a keyword (singular) could actually be a set of words or a phrase. For example,

Truly Passive Income from My Old Blog

July 11, 2012July 2, 2012 by Matthew Allen

If you’ve read the introductory post for this blog, which was written not too long ago, you know that I recently quit my old blog in order to focus on creating a passive income and blogging about it here. Much to my surprise, that blog is still creating some income! I will explain, but first let me give you a little background.

I started my RamblingFever Money blog as a result of finding the Yakezie network. Yakezie is an entire community of personal finance bloggers and they had a challenge. I was intrigued, so I started a personal finance blog and joined the challenge. People probably wonder why or how I came up with RamblingFever Money as the name of the blog. Honestly, that is the result of me being cheap and not wanting to spend

A Glimpse of Success

July 11, 2012June 26, 2012 by Matthew Allen

I started work on my very first niche site on May 30th, less than one month ago. On that day I pretty much just loaded WordPress onto the site, installed a few basic plug-ins and created one page. The next day, May 31st, I created 3 more pages for the site as well as a Disclaimer page and a Privacy Policy page. Keep in mind, when I say I created the pages that is all I did. I created them and hit Publish with NO content on any of the pages. I did this for a couple of reasons:

I am a WordPress beginner and this was the only way I could figure out how to get tabbed page headings on my navigation bar. I now know there are other ways, but haven’t exactly figured out how yet.
I wanted to create a “Welcome” post or “Guide” that explained what the site was about and linked to each separate page. I needed to have the pages created in order to have the permalinks to do that.
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Building My First Niche Site – The Dumb Way

July 11, 2012June 19, 2012 by Matthew Allen

Wow! It is taking me a really long time to build my first niche site. As mentioned earlier, I bought two domains and want to complete both of those sites before I buy any more. The entire ordeal is a huge learning process for me, as I am new to WordPress and the concept of building niche websites. Regardless of how long it is taking, I am pleased with how the first site is coming along. I did some things with it though that might be considered dumb. I want to explain them here in this post. First off, I want to share exactly where and how I have learned (and am still learning) how to build niche sites.

Internet Experts Who Have a Clue
That’s right! I’ve learned everything from others who I consider to be experts in internet marketing, building websites, and just making money on the internet in general. All of the information I’ve consumed was free

Passive Income with Niche Websites

July 11, 2012May 29, 2012 by Matthew Allen

Since all 4 readers that remained at RamblingFever Money seemed to follow me over here, and then some, the blogger in me feels the need to be more specific and tell everybody exactly what I plan to do. If you didn’t get a clue from the title of this post, niche websites is my plan to start out. I have other passive income aspirations as well, but I already have the resources and ability to start building niche sites. This may or may not excite you. When I first heard about niche sites by reading about other bloggers dabbling with them, I shrugged off the idea. I barely knew how to build a blog, let alone a focused website on a particular niche. Over time, the idea has intrigued me more and more. The thought of spending the time to build out a site and then just let it sit and make money for me is pretty exciting.

So Why Niche Sites Instead of a Blog?
A niche site is generally very focused on a specific keyword and set of related long-tail keywords. A blog

An Introduction to Dumb Passive Income

July 11, 2012May 23, 2012 by Matthew Allen

Dumb Passive Income Introductory Post
Hello! Welcome to Dumb Passive Income. This is the very first post on a brand new blog that I’ve decided to create. Allow me to introduce myself, in case you’ve not yet read my about page. My name is Matthew Allen. You can call me Matt if you’d like. I’ve been around the blogosphere for a little while now. Most recently, I’ve been blogging in the personal finance niche at RamblingFever Money. More about that in a later post. But, for those of you who may recognize my name, that is where I come from.

If you’ve read the last three posts that I wrote on my RamblingFever Money blog, you would see that I’ve recently had a bit of a revelation when it comes to creating passive income and getting rich quick. For this very reason, I’ve decided to abandon my former blog and concentrate on this one instead. Within the contents of this blog, I plan to highlight exactly what I am doing to create passive income.

Guessing Your Visitors per Month

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