Back from vacation

Well I am back from a great vacation in Mexico well rested and more motivated than ever to get this train rolling. Wouldn't it be great to be able to have this view for more than a few weeks a year?

Well, sitting on the beach, a margarita in hand, it occurred to me that this is the type of things passive income can allow you to do. And boy was that a motivating thing!

Now don't get me wrong, I like my 9 to 5 job and don't plan on quitting tomorrow to concentrate full time on my few projects. But am I not allowed to dream a little?

So what is the goal right now? Well, at this point I still have my target of $5,000 of passive revenues for 2012. Now to reach a goal, you have to lay out a plan and that's what I'm working on right now. I am still putting some work in my first niche site and I am happy to see that it is climbing the google ranks slowly but surely.

After that I have a few more ideas of blogs and other niche site I want to start rolling out, probably sometime in December. I am not ready to discuss what these are for various reasons, but rest assured that the readers of this blog will be the first to read about it. Speaking about this blog, you will have noticed that there are ads on the right hand side and that a new Bluehost ad too. These are some simple way to try to monetize this blog (although the main goal of the blog is to chronicle my progress through this adventure, wouldn't it be nice if the blog itself could generate some passive income?).

Bluehost is the hosting service I am using for my first niche site and so far I've been pretty satisfied with it. LOVE the 1 click wordpress install! Disclaimer, these bluehost links and the banner are all affiliate link, meaning I will get a commission if any of my reader should decide to subscribe to bluehost using these links.

Now about my niche site. It's been a while since I've talked about it and even though it's in a very "work in progress" and incomplete stage, I've decided to talk a bit more about it here.

Inspired by my recent physical training and the use of my Suunto t6d (again, affiliate link, commission, thank you very much!) I've decided to start a heart rate monitor review site. If you go visit the site right now, it will seem pretty simple and light and you will most likely wonder how in hell could this empty shell generate any sort of revenues. Well, come back to it in a few days, and again in a few months and you should see much more content. The goal here is to provide useful reviews of a nice type of product and hopefully people who feel compelled to buy one of these products using a link on that site and thus generate a commission from amazon.

So, if you're in the market for a nice heart rate monitor as a Christmas gift to yourself or a loved one feel free to buy it from my review site! ;)

What have I been up to?

It's been quite a few days since my last post so I think an update is definitly due! The last few days have been really busy and all that stuff about creating passive revenue streams (and blogging!) has taken a bit of a back seat. Thing is, I went out of town for a cousin's birthday, then the mad rush began.

I am leaving on Saturday for an overdue vacation. I am going to spend a week in Mexico around Riviera Maya with a good friend of mine. In itself this should not have prevented me from working on my income streams, quite the opposite actually, it has motivated me to do more before I go for a week. Problem is, my day job has been an intense sprint to make sure I close as much stuff as I can before going away. This along with the (let's be honest) intense celebration of the last week end, has left me pretty drained.

So my niche site is currently in an incomplete mess, this blog has been left out quite a bit, and I won't be able to work on all that much next week. Well... at least I hope a nice trip report comes out of this! Oh and of course, preparing this trip brought me passive revenues ideas I might explore a bit (and blog about) when I come back.

My take on passive revenues

Generating passive revenues is a subject that has fascinated many people on the internet for quite a while and that is already discussed at length on many websites. Actually, my inspiration for starting on these projects comes in part from many of these websites! Heck the techniques I use also come from stuff that has already been written down by people who know much more about the subject than I do.

So what do I have to bring to the table by writing this blog?

I hope what can make this blog interesting is the fact that I am like you, an average Joe who still knows little about niche site, advertisement, monetizing blogs, eBooks and stuff like that. I hope that what can make this blog interesting despite the ton of information already available elsewhere is my journey as I go from zero passive income to (hopefully) making a few bucks to complement my 9 to 5 job.

Through this journey I will try to provide as much details as I can about how I go about it, the challenges I meet and my emotional ups and down as I fail and succeed.

THIS is what this blog is about and hopefully you enjoy it. If not, then all is not lost since I am already enjoying chronicling this endeavour.

Niche site progress and monetization strategy

As I said in my last post, my first niche site is finally online. Slowly the content there is starting to take shape and the site is starting to resemble a real website. Readers of this blog have probably noticed the ads on the right side and wonder if advertisements are also my strategy to generate passive income from my niche site.

I thought about it for a while and my main money making strategy there is to use affiliate links to amazon for the product my niche site is centered around (no, I will not divulge what it is, or the URL of the site just yet). I guess I still could have put ads on there too, but I felt that the ads might actually compete with my affiliate links and I'd much rather visitors click on the affiliate links than on advertisements.

In case you don't know what affiliate links are, a lot of online retailers have affiliate programs. Basically what it means is that you can register as an affiliate and start promoting any product they sell. If a sale comes from your affiliate links, you get a commission on the sale.

Pretty neat and I will discuss this in more details in a future post.

My first niche site is online!

Well... kind of. It is online but with only very limited content and I can't stay I'm completely happy with the current layout. So I still want to work on it before I start pushing it.

Time to go back to the content farm!

One more step towards my niche site

Well as of this morning, my domain is registered, my hosting is paid for the next year and the "shell" of my first niche site is there. All that's left is putting content in there and then, hopefully, it will slowly start to generate some passive revenues.

Where does that leave me now? Well, there is still a lot of work to do before this thing is actually "ready".

• I have to write content... LOTS of content for the site
• I have to register as an affiliate for reselers of the product my niche site is about
• I have to figure out the best way to display ads on my site
• I have to try and find some way to get backlinks to that site to improve my google rankings

There are probably other things I still have to do that I can't think of right now. Point is, I just made a pretty important step, but it's still just one step.