There are many different types of income. I’m only going to talk about passive income in this post.

If you don’t know what passive income is all about let me explain.

Lets say for example, you buy a house with the intention of renting it. Now the rent you charge is higher than the payment you have to make to the mortgage each month. The resulting difference will be your passive income from the house. Providing you don’t have to spend in in upkeep on the house.

Another example, you have decided to write a book. You spend a few months putting together a book about the intricate artwork of “Underwater Basket Weaving”. After some waiting you get the book published. The royalties the book will make passive income for years to come.

Those are short examples. The point is once you do the work to set up the income, the income source will need little to no help from you to continue making money.

There are many different ways to make a passive income.

Stocks

Real Estate

Writing

Websites

Investing

Music

There are many more, but those are just a few examples. The hardest part in passive income is getting your first one setup. Once you do however you will find it can be very addicting.

When I first started out with the idea of passive income it was with writing. I started writing fiction and within about five years was able to quit my regular job entirely. That gave rise to my search for other sources of passive income.

I will be writing more on passive income in the coming weeks, but lets see how many streams of passive income you can come up with yourself.

I have heard it said many times, “Content is KING”. I tend to argue with that statement though, traffic is the real king in this online world. Great content, even good content, is important, but if you don’t have traffic content doesn’t mean anything.

Traffic is definitly proportional to the amount of money you will make online. The more traffic, the more money, yes it is that simple. How much more money will depend on a lot of factors though.

• Relevant advertising
• Good Content
• Website Design
• Topic of Website
• Domain name

These factors and more will determine how much money you will actually make from a website.

Traffic is another factor is this game of making money. Just any traffic won’t do however, the traffic must come from a source which gives the best chance for ad clicks. “Which traffic is that”, you ask? That answer gets complicated.

• Search Engines
• Social Websites
• Advertising
• Word of Mouth
• Commenting
• Link Exchanges
• Web Directories
• Article Websites

These are just a few sources of traffic for your website. All traffic isn’t made equal though, traffic can greatly increase or decrease the amount of money you make depending on the type of traffic.

If the traffic coming to your website isn’t relevant to your topic, they are going to leave and not make any money for you. If the traffic is just people surfing around the web reading, the chances of them clicking on ads are also little. Where to get relevant traffic will depend on the niche/topic of your website.

For example, lets say you have a blog on the tricks and tips to building model ships. Everything is setup beautifully on your website, even your ads are all relevant to building or the sale of model ships. You have a great site, great content, and a great design.

Where are you going to get your traffic? Search engines will provide a lot of traffic but only weeks after you get setup, search engines take time to get indexed and ranked, you will get very good traffic but time can be weeks to months down the road.

Social websites are a very quick way to get traffic. The key to social traffic is finding groups and communities which would love your website. Just any old social traffic won’t do, they must have an interest. So joining a group on the building of model trains will be just like joining a group on collecting rusted yard junk, the traffic won’t come to you.

Advertising is a great way to get traffic if you are willing to spend the cash. Unless you are paying someone to write the ads or are experienced in ad writing, it isn’t a place to start. You will spend a lot of money learning the ropes if you don’t know what you are doing, or at least the basics. It is something to think about later.

Word of Mouth is a great way to get traffic since relevant traffic is talking to relevant traffic about your site and recommending it. Like search engines though, it takes time. Web Directories and Link Exchanges are the same way, they take time to build up links and get relelvant traffic.

Commenting, a great way to get quick traffic. It takes time to locate and comment on websites and blogs that are relevant to your topic, but the traffic will be good relevant traffic.

I have just covered in brief a few ways to get traffic. Traffic isn’t something you get overnight, it has to build over the course of time. The hardest part in getting traffic is giving it time to happen. First time bloggers will spend days building a blog and then expecting it to get flooded with traffic all in a week. When they find out that their dreams of instant success isn’t going to happen, depression sets in and the blog is ignored and then shutdown.

Ok, so you have your blog started, everything is set up and you are ready to start posting daily. Have you thought about what kind of writing style you are going to use?

How well your blog will be accepted in the niche you have chosen will depend on your writing style. Some niches will require a professional style, where a personal blog will have a more laid back personal feel to it.

In a professional writing style you will often see a pattern to the article. A typical pattern to a professional article would look like this:

1. Title
2. Objective
3. Information
4. Summary

Common sense will tell you that section three will contain the bulk of your writing. The Objective and Summary will normal be a very short paragraph in which the information is introduced and then reviewed at the end.

The style of the writing will be very formal, correct grammar, sentence structure, correct spelling and word usage. In other words if you don’t know when to use “then” and “than” you will need to pick up a book on writing to help you get things under control.

When you are writing in a professional style think in the way you would read a typical newspaper article. Check out the style of writing in your local newspaper to get a good feel as to how your posts should look and feel. This will help a lot in the beginning and get you on a good track.

How do I know I should be writing in a professional style for my blog? Your niche will determine the style.

Niches like:

• How To
• Technical Reviews
• Product Reviews
• Science
• Teaching/Instructional
• News

These types of niche blogs should always be written in a professional style. The readers will be looking for information. “Just the facts, madam”, that is what you should be thinking with these kind of niches. Personal comments, humor, and anything that doesn’t involve “Who, What, When, How, or Why” should be left out. In these niches and with your professional writing you want the blog to look like an expert on the subject is writing all the content. Readers will want their information from an expert, if you can’t provide it then they will find another source.

What about personal style? Not all blogs require a professional style, the best example is a personal blog. Personal blogs tend to look more like diaries and tend to take on a warm cozy feel to them. You don’t have to be an expert on anything, and if you want to throw some humor or anything else into your writing your reader won’t care. Your posts on a personal blog doesn’t have to have any structure, but it should have the best correct grammar and spelling. While personal blogs are just that, if your reader still won’t weed through spelling problems and grammar to read posts. Readers do have a limit.

There are many other different styles in which to write your blog. For example, if your blog is intended to be funny, humorous, a place for fun, then you are expected to post that way. A professional writing style will run your reader off in a heartbeat.

Once you do decided on the writing style you will use, STAY CONSISTENT! Don’t start changing your writing style for that blog around except to get better in the style. Your readers will be looking for the same style each time they read a post. Changing styles will get your reader confused and they won’t come back anymore.

Since I said you need to learn good grammar for blogging I will give you a writer’s secret. There is one book which every professional writer knows by name. It has helped countless people become better at writing, plus these same writers keep it on their bookshelf. I highly recommend you purchase the book if you want to be a blogger and a better writer.

The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition

It is a small book, but it holds a lot of information on grammar usage.

Ok, you have finally gotten past the fear of starting a blog. You have decided you are going to go for it and become one of thousands of bloggers out there trying to make a living blogging. You are ready, but you have one problem, you don’t know which niche to start a blog.

Picking the niche to start your first blog can be overwhelming. If you read all the blogs out there on becoming a professional blogger you will find they make the choice even harder by talking about keywords, niche size, growing niches, shrinking niches, high pay niches, and so on. A first time blogger will feel like they are in waders with the water coming in over the top, they are lost in a world of terms and the blogsphere.

How can a first time blogger weed through all this and find a niche to start their first blog? The number of ways to pick your fist blog is equal to the number of bloggers on the net right now. Each person is going to tell you something different. As your brain starts to overload on blogging information, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. It is a small light, but it will help you far more than professional blogging advice will right now.

K.I.S.S. – a rule to live by in times of confusion. What does K.I.S.S. rule mean? Although many people have taken this rule and changed it around the original meaning is, “Keep It Simple Stupid”. Sounds harsh but it also makes a lot of sense. So how can we apply this to blogging to pick our first niche?

Blogging is not a “get rich quick” business. It takes a lot of work, learning, more work, a bit of luck, yet more work, and time. The first few months to a year isn’t going to be that exciting, money won’t be pouring into your bank account. Most blogs fail because the blogger picked the wrong niche then got frustrated, bored, ran out of things to write about, or didn’t know the subject well enough to even blog about it.

When you start looking for a niche for your first blog, don’t look at keywords, high pay niches, fast growing niches, or anything else a professional blogger would be interested. Look at you, what are the subjects you like to learn about, hobbies you are interested in, topics you love to talk about, anything you feel passionate about. That is where you will pick your first niche is from yourself.

Those first six months of blogging is a learning curve and a test. You hve to learn how to set up the blog, learn how to make posts, deal with design, graphics, and other minor but important things. That is even before you decide how to montize your blog. If you are not a writer, that will also be a learning curve, blogging is writing and you have to be able to communicate with your readers. You also have to decide where to get photos, information on your niche, how often you will be posting, when and where you are going to write your blog posts, and other factors.

You first blog is also a test. You will be putting your heart and soul, not to mention hundreds of hours into your blog the first six months. Can you pass the test? Are you willing to do all of that to get your blog up and going, even though you haven’t made a dime blogging yet? There is a good chance you won’t make any money blogging the first six months. You are going to be tested in how far you will go to make your blog a success. Most people fail this test because of the niche they picked.

As you examine yourself for a list of possible niches to start your blog, write them down and once you get a good list (ten or so niches), ask yourself the following questions:

1. Do I love to talk to people about this topic?
2. Do I love learning about this topic?
3. Would I love sharing what I know and learn about this topic?
4. Would I be willing to work hard for six months on this topic without making any money?
5. Do I love writing about this topic?
6. Do I know over 200 things about this topic to discuss?

If you can’t answer “YES” to ALL of these questions, then the topic isn’t right for you to blog about. Picking the topic will be setting yourself up to fail. A failed blog is one that will discourage us when we decide to start a second blog to try again. Although we did learn a lot, a failed blog isn’t going to make the next blog any easier or harder. You will just be starting over on a timeline you can not rush.

All the professional advice won’t help you if you can’t get through the first six months of a blog. So K.I.S.S., don’t make your first blog harder than it should be to turn into a success. Find a niche you love, find a niche you know, and find a niche that you wouldn’t care if you made money or not. Once you get through the first six months and the start up phase, then you start looking at professional advice on how to monetize your blog. Once you get past the blogging learning curve then you can start worrying about finding a niche that pays more and is growing.

As a writer and blogger I often find inspiration in some unusual places. It is almost 1:30am as I write this and I was just inspired to write this post after watching the movie, “Dune”. The first make of that movie just went off and I have turned to the computer to get some posts written.

I heard a phrase on the movie which has inspired me to ask my readers the question, “Do you fear becoming a successful blogger”? The phrase which brought this on is in the scene where Paul is being tested by the box early in the movie. While he suffers through the test he says the phrase, “Fear is the mind killer”. That phrase struck home with me in ways I didn’t expect tonight.

Fear is a very interesting emotion. It comes in many forms and can hide inside us directing our actions without us even knowing. Everyone is aware of the fear emotion in some form. Usually it comes in the form of being afraid of something. For example, the fear of spiders, the fear of snakes, the fear of speaking to a large crowd, or fear of ladders. While there are rational fears in the world, such as fear of snakes (if you have ever been bitten you would know what I mean), there are also irrational fears like the fear of speaking to a large crowd. Speaking to a large crowd while it is scary offers us no real danger. We fear it because we don’t want to look bad in front of them, just that thought alone can send some people into a panic attack.

What about fear of change? Fear of success? While some people won’t believe it, there are people in this world afraid to succeed. Afraid of success, you say? Yes… These people try all their lives to succeed in careers, money, and life, but in the end they never escape the life they were born. They grew up poor and died poor, but why? They got an education, a PhD in fact. They have worked for some of the best companies on the planet making a million a year. So how did they die poor?

The answer comes down to fear. Even though they had the world laid at their feet, they grew up poor and couldn’t handle success because something in the back of their mind told them they can’t be a success. Therefore their mind, subconsciously, forced them back to the life they grew up. They are now poor with a PhD wondering what happened, looking to blame family, friends, luck, some god, or anything but the right thing for their fall from success.

That is where another line from the “Dune” movie comes to shine a light of hope on the situation. “The first step in avoiding the trap, is knowing of its existence”, as said by Mintat Howat as he tells Paul before the scene goes on. So now you know of the “Fear of success” trap, how do we avoid it? You have to change your thinking, your mind set on how you look at success and your life.

First Step: What is the first step? Family, friends, co-workers and others will be saying, “Blogging is just another get rich scam”, “You aren’t smart enough to make money online”, or “You aren’t a writer, you hated English in school, plus you failed it”. Do those statements sound familiar or something like them? I’m sure they do, that is the same fear of success coming out of them. They are so buried in their own fear they have already given up before they even got started. Don’t listen to them, you know it is their fear talking and might even be some jealousy. Success can and will bring jealous from those around you, not that they really mean it, but they can’t get past their own fear to succeed.

Second Step: So you got past family, friends and co-workers. You know not to listen to them or believe what they say about your goals. What is the next step? YOU! The statements from the First Step has been beating, pounded, and yelled at you all of your life. You have to change your mind set to become a success, you have to look at success in a new light. Right now you see it as a brass ring always out of reach, but that really isn’t the case.

To be a success at something you first have to define what “success” is to you. There are many kinds of success: going to college, being self employed, becoming good at a sport, writing a book…  You first have to define what “Success” means to you. For most bloggers, success usually means making a living by blogging. So self-employement is the goal.

Your “Fear of Success” will throw many things at you when you are trying to becoming self employed. Doubt will come into your mind many times, such as: This is too hard, too complicated, I’m working hard but not making any money yet, this is taking too long, it isn’t working, I want a social life more than this…. You have probably already said a lot of this. Once frustration sets in statements like this will come out. It will be easy to give up, that is where you have to put your foot down.

You will also have “things” come up all the time to take you away from working on your blog. Kids, spouse, work, friends, food, shower, and even that overrated sleep. “Oh, this is a good movie”, you will say when you know it is time to go write a post. “I forgot the time”, you will say to yourself as you go to bed after playing a video game for 14 hours instead of writing a post. “Fear of Success” has many tricks to use against you, it is in your head and knows you very well.

What can you use against your fear to succeed anyway? You have many tools which you can pull out to kill off that fear.

Desire: your desire to succeed is strong enough to overcome any doubt, any excuse, any lie you want to tell yourself.

Intelligence: you already know there is a trap keeping you from success. Take a step back sometimes and look at your goals and where you have falling into the trap, then get back on track to your desire.

Knowledge: Ok, so you don’t know that much about writing, blogging and you failed English in school. Even as adults we never stop learning. Nothing can stop you from learning what you need to know to succeed. The answers are out there, go find them. Learning is a life long process. Do you really think bloggers knew how to succeed or even blog when they first started?

Goals: Set goals, short term and long term goals. Write them down and put them on the wall behind your computer. Look at them every day and decide which short term goal you are going to tackle first to reach your long term goal.

Realistic: Look at things in the real world. Yes, I know you have fantasies about how you want it to be in real life. Still you have to stay grounded. This success will be hard work for little to no money in the beginning. You may not even reach your major goal a year down the road. Creating a website or blog then making the big time will take time on average. Making enough money to be self employed might take a couple of years or more. Know what to expect and don’t expect to get rich over night.

I would love to hear what other think on this subject. I know I didn’t cover everything.