Blog Archives Archives • Page 10 of 12 • The Dumb Passive Income Blog

My Niche Blog Curated Content Strategy

November 17, 2012November 15, 2012 by Matthew Allen

My number one and initial strategy to kick-start my niche blog project is to utilize curated content for many of my posts. The strategy is really quite genius, I think, and has several benefits which I will explain in this post. A few of the intended consequences of this curated content strategy include:

Building relationships with other bloggers, authors and site owners
Providing content with multiple viewpoints and from varying backgrounds
Link building and social networking for the site
Traffic generation through promotion by others

If done right, site owners or original authors are thrilled when you highlight some of their content using a curation method. It provides value to and benefits them and their site, while at the same time doing the same for your site. It is a win-win situation for both or all parties involved.

Carbonite Referral – $20 Amazon Gift Card for You AND Your Friend

January 15, 2013November 8, 2012 by Matthew Allen

I have been a happy and satisfied paid customer at Carbonite.com for several years now. They’ve always had some sort of referral program, but recently it has gotten much better. Previously, if I could get a friend to sign up I would get a couple free months of the service added to my account. Now they offer free Amazon gift cards as a reward. The normal gift card amount is $10 for each referral sign up, but this amount varies as they run different promotions at different time periods. The current holiday promotion they are running is offering a $20 Amazon gift card for not only the person who refers, but also for the person who signs up for Carbonite! Win-Win!

Blogging + Niche Sites = The Niche Blog Project

November 2, 2012 by Matthew Allen

The Niche Blog Project - Dumb Passive Income — Image from Flickr by kevin dooley

My internet marketing attempts have been fun and interesting, to say the least. I seem to keep jumping from one thing to the next, trying to find the strategy that works best for me to earn an online income. You could say that I have the shiny object syndrome. Every time I see something that looks new or better, I abandon what I was doing and jump to the next thing. My latest, the niche blog project, is actually going to combine much of what I’ve learned over the past year or so and put it all together on one awesome site. The Pay Off Credit Card Network is my brand new site and here is a little bit of background explaining how I got to where I am today.

An Introduction to My Niche Blog Project

October 27, 2012October 26, 2012 by Matthew Allen

Giving special thanks to Google’s latest EMD update, I am scratching my attempts at building micro niche sites and moving on to something bigger. My next attempt at creating passive income online involves starting and running another blog. It is arguable whether income from a blog is considered passive or not, and this could be a great topic for another entire post. I’ve taken this into consideration and have some great ideas to make this niche specific blog as passive as a blog can be. I’m going to take what I’ve learned about SEO and combine that with what I knew about blogging and add in a very specific strategy that could build traffic, relationships and even quality links.

Passive Income to Offset Increasing Taxes (USA 2013)

December 29, 2017October 19, 2012 by Matthew Allen

i want you - Uncle Sam — Image from Flickr by tinou bao

I just received a troubling e-mail from a friend. The e-mail is a forwarded e-mail from his accountant that explains in detail some of the upcoming tax changes that will affect more than 90% of Americans starting in 2013. It makes me wonder why I strive to create riches through passive income at all!

“Raise taxes on the rich.” – “The rich need to pay their fair share.” These are just a few of the democratic/liberal talking points being used during the 2012 presidential campaign to try to appease to middle and lower class voters. Unfortunately, many of these less informed voters probably don’t realize that former tax cuts are about to expire, effectively raising taxes on them. This is happening despite the campaign rhetoric that is telling them otherwise.

Excited To Move from Small Niche Sites to Something Bigger

October 11, 2012 by Matthew Allen

Niche sites are all dried up! - Dumb Passive Income — Image from Flickr by Thomas Tolkien

Over the past week and a half or so, I’ve been mulling over and contemplating what I will be doing to create passive income after the setback due to the Google EMD update. Just after the update, my only site that was still ranking and earning was seemingly untouched. This surprised me, because it was my very first attempt at a niche site and was horribly built. It remained at #1 and was still getting a few ad clicks. Just yesterday, I checked again and it dropped from the #1 spot all the way down to #14. Micro niche sites are completely dead to me!

10 of the 12 domains that I own were initially purchased specifically for the purpose of building small adsense niche sites. All of these domains were either Exact Match Domains or partial match domains. Since the EMD update, I went back and did Google first page analysis again for each one of them.

Google’s EMD Update – Setbacks and Moving Forward

October 2, 2012 by Matthew Allen

If you haven’t heard by now about Google’s latest algorithm change, the EMD (Exact Match Domain) update, well then you are living under a rock as far the internet marketing community is concerned. Just like the former Panda and Penguin updates, this latest one has internet marketers all in a tizzy. More specifically, people who build niche sites and micro-niche sites. It has long been known and accepted that EMD’s held value on their own and were given a little bonus, or boost, when it came to search engine results. If you could find an exact match domain available for a good keyword, it was like finding a nugget of gold in the bottom of your pan!

The niche site community doesn’t know what to think and nobody is certain what exactly the latest update is targeting. One thing that is certain is that Google’s SERP’s are totally different than they were before the update. Everybody has their theories and I’ve been studying up as much as I can to try to figure this out and come up with theories of my own.

Income Report – September 2012

October 1, 2012 by Matthew Allen

Welcome to the Dumb Passive Income – income report! I can honestly say that I am pleased with the little bit of progress that is starting to happen. Although my niches site efforts are still barely paying off, there are a few streams of internet income that are starting to drip money into my accounts.

Admittedly, some of this income isn’t passive. For example, the article income I am receiving for writing a few posts for the Penny Thots blog isn’t really passive. But, I agreed to write 2 or 3 posts per month for that blog from it’s very beginning, which was just before I started this blog. That is an agreement I plan to see through and look forward to the shared success with the sites owner and the other main writers.

Passive Income with Amazon Associates

October 6, 2016September 24, 2012 by Matthew Allen

As a consumer, I love Amazon.com for buying books and other purchases. As an online marketer, I love using their affiliate program – called Amazon Associates – for earning passive income through commissions when others purchase products. Amazon has been a trusted online retailer just about since the dawn of the internet. They went online in the mid 90’s, mostly selling books. They’ve now become a world-leading and innovative drop-shipping site – meaning Amazon doesn’t have a massive warehouse that stores all of these products. Rather, they allow buyers to browse and buy directly from their site and then products are shipped from manufacturers or other retailers.

If people were leery to allow companies to store their credit card information during the early days of the internet, that certainly isn’t the case anymore. I heard a statistic (although I can’t find proof) that Amazon has over 300 million credit card numbers on file!

My Content Strategy For Niche Sites

September 21, 2012September 21, 2012 by Matthew Allen

If you’ve been following along in this Niche Site (the Dumb Way) Follow-Along, you know that I am not using any paid tools, themes or plug-ins and that I am doing all of the work myself. This includes writing the content. This is by far the most time consuming part of building a niche site and one of the things I look forward to outsourcing in the future. For now though, until I get this business rolling and profitable, I will continue to keep doing things the “dumb” way. By doing this, the only thing I stand to lose is some of my time. I am risking very little money (hosting costs) to see if I can make this niche site thing work.

How To Find What To Write About

By this point, I already have my main keyword I am targeting – getting rid of fleas. How to get rid of fleas is a close second, but I am sticking with the former and using the latter as secondary in most of the content. Okay, so I am going to write about getting rid of fleas, but I need to be more specific. I could just guess and start pulling topics out of thin air and write about them. Or,

WordPress Setup for My Niche Sites

October 4, 2012September 14, 2012 by Matthew Allen

I use WordPress for my content management for this blog and all of my niche sites. In my former blogging ventures and experimentation I stuck with Blogger – but have now seen the light. WordPress is far superior with its endless options and easy plug-ins that are available. It takes a little bit of learning and getting used to if you’ve previously used another platform – but it is worth it. I highly suggest you familiarize yourself with WordPress if you wish to take the easiest route to success with niche sites (or a blog for that matter).

Loading WordPress Onto My Domain

In a previous post, I explained in detail my process for purchasing domains and hosting. As mentioned in that post, I use HostGator for my hosting because of it’s extreme ease of use, great customer service and ability to host unlimited domains on the same account for one low monthly price.

My New Niche and Keyword Research Explained

September 7, 2012September 7, 2012 by Matthew Allen

My everlasting quest to create some passive income online has now led me to my 4th attempt at a niche site. As promised, I will be revealing my niche, keyword(s) and domain as part of this Niche Site (the Dumb Way) Follow-Along. I have to admit right off the bat that I was a little apprehensive about sharing this particular niche. The reason being that it is the best of the ones available that I have already purchased domains for. I am a little bit worried that a more experienced and better niche site builder will read this post and “steal” my niche and build a better site that will easily outrank mine. But then again, I am not the only one who has had this idea, as I’ve found at least a few other niche sites built around the same keywords. I think I can build better sites and outrank them – but at the same time I worry that somebody else will build an even better site and outrank me. This is the risk I am taking though by making public and sharing exactly how and what I am doing to build a niche site in an attempt to create some online passive income.

How To Find What To Write About

Loading WordPress Onto My Domain

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