At home, where my time is my own, I’ve had significant success with my blog about the Fiat 500 Abarth, a new car model debuting in the US in 2012. It took 3 months before it made a single penny, but the income from AdSense steadily rose to $100 a month and then $300, and just this month it has made over $1,000! Now that I understand the power of passive income through blogging and niche sites, I’m aiming to replicate that success with a handful of other websites.

Through that first site, I’ve learned a lot about SEO, WordPress, writing, hiring writers, and everything else that is involved with running a revenue generating information site. I have done countless hours of research and had some success, so I feel qualified to talk about it with some authority. Hopefully my advice will help, if you’re just getting started.

Note: I originally wrote this content for a popular forum I frequent, when I was given the responsibility of restarting the blogging thread with a new introductory post. Now that enough time has passed, I’ve decided to republish my first post here, since it is my own content. I have taken the time to update the content with new bits of knowledge I have learned.

Blogging? Isn’t that for weird people with no jobs?

Well, yes. But you’re not going to be like them. You’re going to create a blog that makes money while you sleep!

There are lots of way to make money online: doing surveys, writing articles, etc. Most of those are very time intensive however, especially when compared to the passive income that blogging or niche websites can create. Don’t get me wrong, building a successful blog still requires a considerable amount of work, but once you get one going it can run with minimal input.

Blogging also doesn’t require any one particular skill, other than the motivation and determination to put in the time. In order to be successful, it certainly helps to be skilled at writing and web design and development, but all you really need is time and a willingness to learn. Even if you don’t have the time, there are enough resources out there to simply pay for the skills you don’t possess. I’ll get to that in a later post.

Enough with the pep-talk about determination and heart. Let’s get to the good stuff…

What do I write about?

Picking your blog topic is probably the most important step of the process. Pick something with too much competition (like “video games”) or too few keyword searches and you’re pretty much doomed from the start. First, think of something you might be interested in writing about. Then start typing keywords into the Google Keyword Tool to see what people are actually searching for. I recommend Looking for keywords with at least 1,000 local monthly searches and an Approximate CPC above $1. I used to only consider keywords with low competition, but there is an argument to be made that high competition validates the popularity of the keyword and is not a barrier to entry (if you know your SEO).

Some more tips on using the Google Keyword tool:

• Start with a broad set of words that your blog could cover (‘sleeping bags’, for example), with ‘Only show ideas closely related to my search terms’ clicked. This should give you a big long list of potential long tail topics.
• For the sleeping bag example a lot of it is stuff like ‘princess sleeping bag’, which may not be right for your blog, so be sure to filter out the bad stuff. You’ll notice a lot of duplicates as well, like ‘compact sleeping bag’ and ‘sleeping bag compact’, and I usually just write the one that gets more views, unless I can make the two posts reasonably different.
• It depends on the niche, but for anything below 500 global searches or so, the competition is probably going to be low enough to warrant writing. Anything above that it might not hurt to just check the first page of Google and see.
• Google keyword tool is useful, but you really need to go and actually look at the first page of the Google results for whatever the keyword is and see what kind of chance you have of getting there. This is a half decent guide on analyzing the first page of Google to see what your chances are, but if you’re willing to put more work in, more competition for the first page is acceptable.

You’ll want to target these keywords in all of your posts. You don’t have to write like a spambot, but you need to get those key phrases in. Just write like you normally do, make it engaging for real readers, then come back and insert those keywords where they are needed for SEO.

If you need more help picking a topic, here are some very useful articles from authors that are smarter than me:

• How to Choose the Right Blog Topic
• How to Choose a Blog Niche
• Finding a Profitable Niche: My Process Revealed

What’s Next?

Next week I’ll start getting into the technical details of setting up your website with WordPress. There are a lot of different ways to build a website, including free services like Blogger and WordPress.com, but I always recommend owning your own domain and a self-hosted site using WordPress. This gives you the most freedom and flexibility for the future.

Skyrim is looking to overtake all my time though. It is really, really good. I couldn’t stand Oblivion. I played it for probably 3 hours when it first came out and hated it. The world felt cold, dead, and generic. Every NPC interaction felt wooden, fake, and exactly identical to the last interaction. Skyrim has mostly fixed these problems. The world is cold still, but the location is much more fitting for that and it all just kind of works. NPC interactions feel more realistic and unique.

Combat is pretty much like Fallout 3, with most of your “skill” depending upon your character and weapon stats, plus extremely basic aiming skills. Get powerful enough in a certain skill tree and you’ll be able to CRUSH YOUR ENEMIES… until you encounter a giant who stomps your face in.

Level 1

Totally insecure but easy to remember. This is for all the services that I sign up for on a whim and don’t contain any sensitive information beyond my email. You could argue that I shouldn’t ever use an insecure password, but I’m not too worried about someone hacking my LazyMeter account (task list), for example.

Level 2

Slightly cryptic, but used often enough that I can remember it. This one has a more than 5 characters, a combination of letters, numbers and capitalization. I’ve since added the first two letters of the domain to the beginning, so that the password is unique to each service. This is great for sites that I visit regularly and on multiple devices: home computer, work computer, my phone, etc.

Level 3

Totally random, the more characters the better. I use this tool to get a long, random string for any service that requires my credit card or social security number. You could argue that I should use this level of complexity for all my passwords and so I am heading that direction.

Obviously my brain could never remember a 14 letter random string of letters, numbers and punctuation. Saving this information in a text file on my computer kind of defeats the purpose. Between browsers saving form information and sites leaving cookies, I usually don’t have to type them in. But, what if I login from a different computer, or clear my cache? Or give my login to my wife?

For that, I’ve used Passpack without issue for at least 2 years. Although there is always the risk that someone could compromise Passpack and suddenly have access to all my passwords, I’m actually less worried about that. They use multiple levels of government level security to keep your information safe. I’m much more worried about companies like eBay or Sony who are not only larger targets, but also less worried about your security. With Passpack, that’s pretty much all they do.

I’ve since started using it at work and it has been a boon for productivity. Before we were storing passwords in a database and looking them up with phpMyAdmin. Now that everything is in Passpack, it is easier to search, available remotely, and easily allows us to share individual passwords without giving access to the entire set. This is perfect for remote developers or plain new staff that we don’t quite trust yet to have every password for every client we’ve ever had.

The best part: Passpack is a freemium service. That means the basic account is free and you only pay for access to more storage and other features. For most individual users, the free account is all you need.

I’m using a free theme, which is fairly sparse, so I’ll try to add some color and icons and bits of design here and there to spruce it up. I don’t want to take much away from the content, but it needs some love.

In the meantime I’ll be making sure my sitemaps, analytics, and basic SEO is up and running. Just installed WordPress SEO by Yoast, now moving on to some contact forms (maybe Wufoo), Disqus, etc. Any other suggested plugins?

At SiteGoals we have a lot going on, that’s for sure. We’re creating a project management application that will help our current business, but we think its so good that we can sell it to other agencies like ourselves. So that consumes much of my thoughts during the week. It took several years, but we’re finally at the point where it actually does something very useful and we’re getting close to launching a very limited beta, hopefully by the end of the year. So we’ve started to look into marketing and the whole launch process, which thankfully, has been covered by hundreds of very successful application developers already.

I’m also finally making a little bit of money from blogging, all with AdSense on my blog about the Fiat 500 Abarth. It definitely took a significant amount of time to set up and develop to the point it is now, but at this point it literally requires no time to continue to make money. However to make it grow, I still have to invest an hour a day or so on content development, or improving the design, or social media marketing. But it is essentially at the point where it is cruising and it only requires additional effort if I want to grow it larger, which is great. I’m now looking into how to replicate the minor success into multiple blogs so that I can start to build a portfolio of passive income. Exciting times indeed!

Between the vanilla game and its two expansion packs, there is so much re-playability that I’ve probably reinstalled the game four or five times. There are just so many civilizations and leaders to choose from, so many different maps and strategies to try, that almost no game feels the same. The epic nature of recreating the world is incredibly addicting. I’m ready to reinstall it right now just writing about it. Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately as far as my free time is concerned), there is a new version coming out this month: Civilization V. There have been a slew of previews that have me convinced of its greatness without even trying it. If you’ve played Civ IV, you understand.

The Escapist just posted a new preview which is actually an in-character walk-through of an entire game, complete with video and narration. Definitely work checking out. Here’s a quick sample of the writing:

Crossing the mountain range to the north, I met the first civilized leader, poor Augustus Caesar. No amount of flattery or attempts at trade would crack his smile. Surrounded by finery such as he is, Augustus couldn’t open his heart and mind to the Iroquois way of life. Perhaps that is why he attacked me with his legions, unprovoked and without warning. Caesar’s armies took my great city of Grand River. Little did Caesar know that the Iroquois nation is blessed and that the first our many Golden Ages dawned soon after his treachery. It was the turn of the tide.

Now go read the rest and watch the movie, its well worth it if you’re a Civ fan. You’ll be excited, trust me. While you’re still here, check out another great video preview of the game:

For web design, I keep the WordPress thread bookmarked at all times. If I ever have a question about themes that Google can’t answer, this is where I go for answers. In fact the whole coding forum has a wealth of useful information.

Since I just bought a new GTI, I keep up on both the VW/Audi Question&Answer Thread and the 2.0 FSI Tuning Thread (that’s the engine). If you have an even remotely sporting car, chances are there’s a thread for your make/model. Sometimes there might even be an official rep from a dealer or manufacturer that chimes in with very useful information.

I’m playing Fantasy Football this year (go USC Boosters!), so I’m now following the Week 1 Sit/Start thread (I’ll have to bookmark week 2, etc.) and Fantasy Football 2010. Even if I have a very specific question about which player I should pick or start/site, its likely that someone else will have the exact same problem and has already asked the question and had it answered. Like I said, there are just so many members of the forum, there is a wealth of useful information available.

Be sure to look for free magazine subscriptions, find some hilarious comedy podcasts to listen to, catch up on what you’ve missed since you stopped collecting Legos, and see some beautiful automobile photography.

Trust me, if you can think of a topic, you’ll probably find it buried somewhere within the Something Awful forums, where a group of nerds are discussing it fervently. I’m sure you’ll lurk for awhile before realizing that $10 is nothing and it will be worth it to get rid of the annoying ads, bad language filter, and have the ability to actually contribute something yourself.

Here’s a list of the links that I provided them for future reference:

Official Documentation:

• Official WordPress Codex
• Template Tags (codex)
• Template Hierarchy (codex)

Tutorial Websites:

• Nettuts
• Smashing Magazine
• Rockable Press (ebook)

Other Useful Links:

• Starkers Theme
• Thematic