Personally I have had poor results using many of the traditional Internet Marketing methods to create passive income. Producing pages of content whose sole purpose is to get natural search engine traffic and then have visitors click on an AdSense ad or click on a link to an affiliate offer has not proven to be very successful for me. (even though I may still be doing this depending on when you are reading this page)
It seems like such a waste of time to spend so much energy to get new website visitors only to send them elsewhere. It just makes more sense to try to capitalize on all that effort and somehow turn visitors into followers, subscribers or fans so that we can continue to communicate with them.
However this is not a social media exercise. We are still looking to sell products and services to make make money, after all this is about passive INCOME. So just to be clear we want to create an audience and maintain their attention so that we can occasionally make them an offer. I say occasionally because to maintain their attention we have to offer excellent value and a reason for them to pay attention to us. We can’t do that if we try to sell them something every time we communicate with them.
With the above in mind I will attempt to create a series of principals that will guide my actions going forward.
Rule Number One
Never produce content on my website whose sole purpose is to attract search engine traffic and rankings.
Rule Number Two
The primary purpose of the website is never to send people somewhere else to buy a product or a service.
The primary purpose of the website is to create a subscriber, a follower, a person who has given us permission to talk to them in the future or has decided to follow us in some form or another.
If we use the 2 principles above to guide our purchase decisions for Internet Marketing products and services it should pretty well rule out 90% of all of the courses and products/services that are available from Internet Marketing teachers and gurus.
I will be adding more Rules as time goes on as well as documenting my journey to a Passive Income model that is sustainable and can realistically be called a “business”.
David