There are many different ways that you can break free from a regular job and become self sufficient, but the techniques that I am using, and the methods I will talk about here, will give you a passive income, meaning that the work that you do now will continue to pay off after the work is done, the aim is to end up with a steady stream of income that continues to come in long after you have completed the work. Many people find it hard to believe that these real work at home jobs exist, as it is so ingrained in our psyche that you go to work for a week, and you get paid for the work you did that week. For this reason, many will try and convince you that this is a pipedream. After all, if it were possible, why isn’t everyone doing it?

The answer to that question is simple; it is hard work to set it up. People seem to translate the term “passive income” as meaning “getting paid for doing nothing”, and that is the ultimate goal, but there is a long road to travel before you get there. This is the reason that people fall for so called “money making ideas” that promise to hand everything to you on a silver platter just by sending them $67.95. This is good news for anyone that is serious about wanting to succeed with this type of business model. If you are persistant and put in the work, you will eventually get there, and you will be met with minimal competition (assuming you choose the right niches), because the majority of the world is lazy.

Creating this type of lifestyle online consists of five steps, each one is of critical importance. The five steps are; niche selection, property building, content creation, promotion and monetization. Your goal is to have web properties that are considered to be an authoratative source of knowledge on your chosen topic. Considered authoratative by who, I hear you ask? Well, by the search engines primarily, as it is the search engines that will direct people to your property. What’s more, it’s really just one search engine that we need to primarily concentrate our efforts on. Yep, you guessed it, Google. The Big G. Google is the place that the majority of Internet users go when they are looking for. They are so popular, that Google is now considered a verb, rather than a brand name. We’ve all done it. You want the phone number of that new pizza shop? Just Google it. Your kids thrown you a curveball with a homework question? Get them to Google it. Because of Googles popularity, it is imperative that we understand the way it works in order to succeed, and I will be discussing this in much greater depth in posts to come. Once you have an authoratative property, you will naturally get a lot of visitors, and there are many different ways that you can turn that traffic into money.

Make Money From Home – Step One – Niche Selection

So back to our five steps, and I will only be touching on these briefly today, and expanding on them in days to come. Firstly, niche selection. If you are going to create a web property with the hope of attracting visitors who will convert to money, you need to be focussed in your approach. This very first step is the place where most people slip up, and if you get this step wrong, it is going to be an uphill battle to make anything of your efforts. A personal blog that is about anything and everything may seem like the most amazing thing to you, but there is no focus, and even if people do end up on your site, they will be people who are surfing around, looking for anything and everything. They are lsort of like the people that come into the store because they’re waiting for the bus, they have no intention of buying anything, and no reason to be there, they are just killing time. If, however, you create a very focussed website about one particular topic, then the people that you will attract will be people that are interested in that topic, and it’s these people that will convert to money. Choosing a good topic (or niche, or keyword), is a delicate process. It needs to be a topic that is somewhat popular, otherwise, even if you do become an authoratative source, you are not going to get many visitors. It also needs to be a “paying” topic. This means that people must be willing to spend money on the niche that you have selected. Finally, it needs to be a topic that is not too competitive, particularly when you are just starting out. I mentioned earlier the folly of trying to get rich off this site, which is all about making money from home. The reason I said that is because the competition for this niche is fierce, and it would be a great deal of work for me to get anywhere worthwhile with it.

Make Money From Home – Step Two – Property Building

Step two is site creation, and this is all nuts and bolts stuff, which I will touch on, but I am not an expert on. There are plenty of resources available for people who want to learn how to buid there on websites, and there is blogging software available that automates a lot of the tedious work. That said, you don’t even need to build your own property from scratch. There are places where you can go that allow you to build quick and easy pages about your topic with very little technical knowledge needed. We will look at places like Hubpages and Infobarrels as well, as these are tools that can be of great benefit to the beginner, a great way to get your feet wet before venturing out on your own.

Make Money From Home – Step Three – Content Creation

Then comes content creation. This is the bane of my existance. You may be mistaken for thinking that I enjoy writing, given the length of this post, and there are topics, like this, that I can quite easily ramble on about forever. Unfortunately, the topics that you will end up writing about will quite often be boring, tedious, and even gross at times. It’s a necesary evil, however. The Internet is basically the worlds biggest library, and if you want to be a part of it, you are going to need to do some serious writing. Either that, or you are going to be spending a lot of money to get people writing for you. Either way, it’s going to cost you time or money, it’s up to you to decide which one you can afford more of. Another skill that you are going to need is the ability to research. Many of the topics you will write about, you will have no idea about, so it’s important to have a firm grasp on researching information so that you can become an authority on it. We will also be discussing this in much greater length in posts to come.

Make Money From Home – Step Four – Promotion

So, you’ve chosen your niche, you’ve built your site, and you’ve written your content, but no one is coming? That’s because you haven’t done any promotion yet, and the search engines have no idea of your importance. As far as Google is concerned, the Internet is a big popularity contest, and popularity is measured by how many links are pointing at your site. It’s not only the number of links that are important, however, it’s also the quality and relevance of those links. If you have a website on kettles, and you get a heap of links from other websites about motorbikes, those links aren’t going to be worth much, because the two sites are not relevant. If you got some links from a site about kitchen appliances, however, that would be fantastic. Google knows that your two sites are related to each other, and that link will hold a lot more weight. There are numerous ways to get links pointing back to your site. This is a huge topic of discussion, and yes, we will be going into it in depth.

Make Money From Home – Step Five – Monetization

And finally, we have monetization. Payday. You’ve put in all the hard work, and you are getting a steady stream of “customers” coming through your “door”, so now you need to decide what it is you’re going to sell them. This doesn’t mean that you have to create a product (although you could, if you were that way inclined, but it wouldn’t truly be passive income then, would it?). You can sell other peoples products, or you can simply have advertisements on your site, and get paid a small amount for every person that clicks on those ads. Once again, there are many different way to monetize a website. We will be looking at them eventually, but that is a long way down the track. We have a lot of work to do before we get there. Talk to you again soon.