Blog Archives Archives • Page 9 of 12 • The Dumb Passive Income Blog

Mini NSP – WordPress Setup and Choosing a Niche Website Theme

February 21, 2013February 20, 2013 by Matthew Allen

Mini NSP - WordPress Setup - Niche Website Theme — Looks like somebody who is probably frustrated with trying to set up their niche site!

Setting up WordPress and choosing a good niche website theme can be a daunting task if you are brand new to building niche sites. I know this to be the case for me personally, as I spent many hours figuring all of this stuff out on my own in the past. I combed through the internet and read several posts from other niche site builders to see how they do things. I spent many many hours playing with different free themes to try and get the look and functionality that I wanted for my niche sites. As a total rookie to WordPress and building niche sites, you can imagine my frustration! Now that some time has passed and I have learned a great deal, I feel like I can share some of my findings so that hopefully others won’t have to waste as much time as I did. Building a niche site both effectively and efficiently has gotten so much easier for me. As an example and part of this Mini Niche Site Project – I want to share exactly how I do things and what I use now.

The Miniature Niche Site Project – Mini NSP

February 20, 2013February 14, 2013 by Matthew Allen

When I started this blog in May of 2012, my efforts to create passive income online were targeted mostly at building smaller niche sites. I had some early success with my very first attempt at building a niche site. I got over-confident and decided that I was qualified to teach others how to obtain the same success that I had found. So I decided to do a Niche Site Follow Along, inspired mostly by Pat Flynn’s very popular Niche Site Duel series. I started to show my exact processes for how I build a niche site. I failed on my first attempt and started over from scratch, all within that same follow along series. I was plugging away on my next attempt, and then the EMD update hit and completely burst my niche site bubble. So what did I do to keep my burning desire to create passive income online alive?

Passive Income Report – January 2013

October 11, 2013February 8, 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.

Foliofn Note Trading Platform for Lending Club Investing Review

August 11, 2013January 31, 2013 by Matthew Allen

Lending Club Investor Availability by State

Foliofn Note Trading Platform for Lending Club - Michigan Lighthouse — Michigan’s West Coast

As an investor at Lending Club, and a resident of the great state of Michigan, I currently have only one of two options available to me for how I am able to obtain notes. I must purchase notes via the note trading platform by Foliofn, which is the secondary market used by Lending Club, for trading peer to peer (P2P) notes. The other option is to fund notes directly through the more common retail platform, which is not currently available to investors in all 50 states. The difference between these two options is basically this – the retail platform is for notes that are not yet fully funded or acitve and the note trading platform consists of notes (or loans) that already exist and are active. After reading through several blog posts and blog comments, I am finding that a lot of people prefer the retail platform and feel that the secondary note trading platform by Foliofn is inferior. I am the exact opposite. Although I am not able, or even allowed (currently), to take part in the retail platform – I actually think I like the note trading platform better. Only three months in to my Lending Club investing experiment, and I’ve been able to maintain a Net Annualized Return of over 22%!

How I Get More Keyword Traffic with Long Tail Pro Platinum

February 15, 2014January 22, 2013 by Matthew Allen

Keyword Traffic with Long Tail Pro Platinum - 2

Keyword Traffic with Long Tail Pro Platinum — Image from Flickr by Gerrit Wenz

Since my purchase of Long Tail Pro, and subsequent upgrade to Long Tail Platinum, I’ve been getting a lot more keyword traffic to this site. I use Long Tail Pro (Platinum version) to do preliminary research before every single blog post I write now, on this blog and others. The Platinum version of Long Tail Pro enables me to quickly find low competition keywords that have a good number of monthly searches. By quickly, I mean I usually spend less than 10 minutes researching keywords before I write a post. This helps me figure out exactly how I should title the post and which keywords I should optimize for within the post. By simply taking a few extra minutes to do some simple research, I increase the amount of keyword traffic that finds my site through the search engines every single day.

Earn Free Amazon Gift Cards with Carbonite Referral

February 22, 2013January 16, 2013 by Matthew Allen

Want to hear one way that I generated some passive income throughout much of the month of December? I was able to earn free Amazon gift cards, several of them, through the Carbonite referral program. At the time, Carbonite was running a holiday promotion where the referrer (me) and the person who signed up (the customer) would each receive a $20 Amazon gift card. The promotion was supposed to end on January 3rd, 2013. I was completely shocked when on January 9th another $20 Amazon gift card showed up in my e-mail inbox! I thought maybe there was some sort of delay in the system, until I received an e-mail on January 14th stating that the promotion has been extended. As of January 4th, the $20 Amazon gift card for you and your friend promotion has been reinstated with no planned end date.

Passive Income with Peer to Peer Lending at Lending Club

August 11, 2013January 11, 2013 by Matthew Allen

Much of my focus on this blog so far has been on my attempts at internet marketing through building various types of websites to try to create a passive income. However, there is one other thing that I am doing to create passive income online that does not require the work and knowledge that it takes to build a website. I recently invested some money at a peer to peer (P2P) lending site, Lending Club. Whether or not investment income from interest of this nature is considered passive or not is debatable. For me, it is passive enough. I spend about 30 to 60 minutes per month choosing notes to reinvest my principal and interest payments into. So it isn’t completely passive. But, I am not actively trading time for money like I do at my day job. I choose the notes to put my money into about once a month, then they sit there and earn interest for the entire month while I do nothing. Allow me to explain how and why I got started in P2P lending at Lending Club.

Passive Income Opportunities for 2013

January 1, 2013 by Matthew Allen

As the New Year is upon us, I for one am excited about the passive income opportunities that await me in 2013. 2012 was a whirlwind of a year for me as I quit my original plan for a money-making blog. I wanted all of the work and time that I put in online to create more of a passive income. It’s been a long and slow learning process for me, but I am definitely heading in the right direction. I’ve attempted several different methods throughout the past year to try to create online passive income. Most of them had something to do with creating different types of websites, and that is mostly what I blogged about on this site. I didn’t have a ton of success with my niche sites, but there still is hope for a few of them in the future. I do have three passive income opportunities that I have been working on that I am really excited about and plan to concentrate on in 2013.

Analyzing “What Keywords Do I Rank For?” with Long Tail Pro – Platinum

January 10, 2013December 18, 2012 by Matthew Allen

Have you ever Googled the question, “What keywords do I rank for?” Me neither. But I know that a little over 200 people worldwide Google that exact question every month (on average). And I know exactly what they are looking for and why. They simply want to see what keywords their website is ranking for in Google, and in what position. This can be very useful information if you know what to do with it. Consider this to be a sort of internal keyword research for your website. Really, it’s more of an analysis. But if you combine your website analysis with some good keyword research, you will quickly see the benefit and understand ways that you could improve search traffic to your website or blog.

Keyword Research for Blogging: Picking the Right Keyword

October 28, 2016December 9, 2012 by Matthew Allen

Since purchasing my new tool – Long Tail Pro – a few weeks ago, and being given the privilege of testing out the beta version of Long Tail Platinum, I can’t stop doing keyword research! It’s like an obsessive addiction and I just can’t get enough. I’m finding myself doing keyword research, just out of curiosity, for other websites that I visit. Most of these sites are blogs, and I just can’t get over how overlooked and under-used this entire concept of keyword research for blogging is. It has become my new obsession to get the word out to the blogging community. My mission is to show bloggers how they could and should be taking advantage of some pretty simple tactics to drive as much search traffic to their sites as possible.

How to Use Keyword Research for Blog Post Optimization

January 10, 2013December 4, 2012 by Matthew Allen

One great way to grow an audience to your blog is through search engine traffic. You just never know which random searcher is going to land on your blog, like it, subscribe to it, share it, and keep coming back for more. There are certain numbers of people searching for different search terms on Google every single month. By knowing how to properly do keyword research and how to use those keywords to best optimize your blog posts, you can get as many of these searchers as possible to land on your blog. The beauty of growing your blog or website through search engine optimization is that you don’t get the same people coming back time and time again. Different people throughout the entire world will be typing in the search terms that you are optimizing for and at different times. The growth potential is endless if you properly optimize a post on your site for a low competition keyword that gets lots of searches!

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Keyword Research to Optimize Your Blog Posts

June 10, 2013November 26, 2012 by Matthew Allen

The importance of using keyword research to optimize your blog posts is vastly overlooked and undervalued in the wide world of blogging. I would dare say that most bloggers don’t even know what keyword research is. How can they possibly know how to use it to optimize their blog posts if they don’t know what it is? One very basic function of keyword research is to find out how often a certain search term is being searched for in the search engines (with Google being by far the most popular). You can then use that information to optimize your blog post by determining exactly what to write about and how to word it within the post.

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