One Student’s Story: $0 to $800+ per month Passive Income in About a Year

One Student’s Story: $0 to $800+ per month Passive Income in About a Year

The following is an unsolicited guest post from one of our students, a great guy who goes by the handle ’skinnyninja’ in our forums. Yes, he is skinny. And yes, he is a ninja. In addition to building his passive income online, he supports the addiction recovery community with a really amazing blog. Anyone struggling with any addictions (or even bad habits) would be wise to check it out.

Let me introduce myself:

* I am a student of The Keyword Academy.

* I signed up for the 1 dollar trial at TKA back in April of 2009, so I have been in the program for a little over a year now.

* Before joining TKA, I worked very hard on a single website for 3 years, but it was not making much money to really speak of. Some days I would make a dollar or even less in Adsense earnings.

Let’s cut right to the chase: after about a year of learning and applying new knowledge, my results can speak for themselves. This money shot is for the last seven days, not an entire month:

Now obviously, $199 for a week in Adsense earnings will translate into some nice monthly earnings. $800 dollars or so each month in passive earnings is not to bad for 10 months worth of effort, right? It is certainly the best investment that I have made in quite a while. I mean, what would you be doing with an extra $800 in cash every month? I have it flowing into my life right now, with almost no additional work to maintain it, and let me tell you….it makes a huge difference!

Please keep in mind that I work a full time job in the real world and do not possess amazing internet marketing skills or anything. I am just a regular guy who was looking for an additional stream of income, and started looking for a way to learn more about how to make money online.

You are probably wondering how I was able to produce $800 per month in passive earnings using the Keyword Academy program. I’m going to break it down into the key areas where I think the real value comes from, and how I make more money because of it:

* Extreme focus
* Support and community
* TKA Tools
* Leadership and challenges
Extreme focus

Making money on the internet can be absolutely overwhelming. There are so many different methods you could test out, so many different techniques you could try. This might include anything from selling stuff on eBay, to writing freelance articles for extra cash, to attempting what Court and Mark teach to develop a passive stream of income from search engine traffic. Some people get overwhelmed before they even choose a direction to go in!

On top of the confusing options, the market is littered with scams, especially in the make money online world. It is a rare treat to find someone who is willing to give you 100% full access to everything for a measly one dollar test drive….not to mention that they make this offer for an entire month.

A big part of what helped me in getting to my income goal was increased focus. Court and Mark actually harp on this concept quite a bit, because it produces results in the real world. They have a detailed system for generating traffic and then making money from that traffic, and they are fanatical about cutting out the extra fluff that does not lead to increased income. Every single action you take when working on internet marketing should be driving you towards your income goals. The TKA program has a number of ways that they go about enhancing focus for students.

Part of the success of the TKA program is in the focus and the simplicity. Court and Mark are teaching you how to generate search engine traffic, period. Yes, there are a million little details to pile on top of this. Is the topic profitable? Do searchers for a certain keyword tend to click ads or ignore them? Is there enough income potential with a keyword to make it worthwhile? Could we make more money by ditching Adsense and selling affiliate products instead? And on and on. But the core program sweeps everything aside and shows you how to answer all of these questions, and more, with focus and simplicity. In fact, the program allows for plenty of expansion and flexibility, in that once you learn how to choose the optimal keywords for your topic and start generating traffic, it then becomes quite easy to test different methods of monetization, optimize for different keywords, expand into other keyword categories, and so on.

Also, once you learn how to focus on the actions that produce traffic and income, it becomes so much easier to replicate those actions and scale your efforts up. With so much clutter and junk in the world of internet marketing, it is nice to be able to sweep 99 percent of it aside and learn how to engage in the actions that can grow your passive earnings.

How focus has helped me make more money:

At one point in my internet marketing career, I was checking my earnings once per day, and was always devastated when it was not higher than it was the day before. Both Court and Mark helped me achieve a mental breakthrough–both in different ways and in slightly different areas–that allowed me to truly separate what made a day successful for me or not. Once I was able to separate my earnings for the day from the amount of work I was doing, I was able to rapidly accelerate my marketing efforts and my income started to jump. This mental conditioning led to some pretty big action for me, and helped me to move beyond a plateau that I was stuck at for months. As a result, my income pretty much doubled over a period of 90 days, and it has been steadily rising ever since then.

You may have a website, or a couple of websites, and you put in some tough work and you get to a point where your earnings sort of levels off for a while, and you can’t really see the next major leap to make. I have been at this point at least twice in the last 10 months. Each time, I was able to break through this point after listening to either Court or Mark during a live webinar. I came away from the live session with a spark of inspiration and an idea, a feeling of “I can do this!” And thus I would start taking massive action on my web properties, somehow putting in a ton of hard work in such a way so as to seriously boost my earnings in the long run. And both times that this happened–when I attacked my business with renewed focus–I always saw a substantial leap in earnings within the next 90 days.

Focus is such a huge part of internet marketing, because the hard work that we put in today will not pay dividends from an SEO standpoint for several weeks or even months. So my breakthroughs have always occurred when Court and Mark were able to convince me to take it on blind faith that “If you do X, you will get Y.” Rinse and repeat.
Support and community

In my opinion, the forum alone is worth the price of admission. Ask an honest question or request some feedback or opinions, and you get it right away, within an hour or less. Instant guru help. In nearly every case, people who are earning thousands of dollars per month in internet marketing are jumping in left and right to help you with questions. It really is an unbelievable community. And of course, Court and Mark themselves are active on the forums, and this provides huge value as well.

Beyond the forum, there are other forms of support as well, and one of the biggest perks is a programming ninja named Peter that is on staff with Court and Mark. He is a delight to work with, can resolve just about any technical issue, and provides incredible insight and new tools to the community.

Participation in the private forum can be a double edged sword. If you hang out there all day and fantasize about making money online, then you obviously are not taking the actions necessary to grow your income.

Luckily, the TKA members help to keep each other in check with this a bit. There are at least two nifty tricks built into the forum that make it more useful: a karma system and a badge system. You can glance through a thread and quickly find the people who can speak with real authority, because these things are already in place to provide you with instant information. This is not to say that the newcomer gets drowned out in the crowd, however. Anyone can ask a question in the forums and instantly get expert advice and quality feedback within minutes. I have never seen a question go unanswered.

How TKA support has helped me make more money:

Every couple of days I get an idea and I write up a forum post and bounce it off the community. This is priceless. I get ideas, other people weigh in with their ideas, and we all help each other to make more money. I have hired people in the forums for various services, such as article writing, keyword research, and even link building, but this is all besides the point. The instant feedback from dozens of professional internet marketers is what really keeps me coming back. The reason I stick and stay is because I have this professional, high quality sounding board to test my ideas with.
Tools

Here is what Court and Mark did: they hired an awesome programmer, explained the biggest bottlenecks in making money with their system, and then demanded that this guy come up with brilliant solutions that could automate nearly all of the grunt work. What he came up with is fantastic, and there are least two major tools in the TKA program that more than make up for the price of admission, over and over again. One tool helps you to find profitable keywords, the other helps you to rank well in the search engines. Both tools are extremely powerful and are market leaders in their category. Since they are private tools used only by the community, they may not be recognized as market leaders, but they are (I know because I have tested the market!).

Really, these two tools are so good that Court and Mark could have easily justified commissioning their existence, even without ever sharing them with the community. They are so powerful that just one person could benefit tremendously from them….so you can imagine how much value they add to an entire community.

How TKA tools have helped me make more money:

Without going into too much detail, let’s just say that roughly 90 percent of my efforts rely exclusively on tools that I use from the Keyword Academy. Sure, I use some outside resources for things like content creation, creating and building links, and even finding keywords, but all of this has continued to shrink as the new tools at TKA have integrated most of my old methods. The tools just automate everything and make it a “one stop shopping solution.” No need to go elsewhere right now, as my income is steady rising with the tools I am working with.

Don’t get me wrong…the tools are not magic. They do not make money rain down from the sky. Ultimately, some bottlenecks still exist when it comes to increasing your income. You still need lots of original content, you still have to find keywords, and you still have to create links. The tools at TKA do a good job at making a serious dent in at least two of these areas. But you will still have to put forth some real effort, and it always takes a bit of time to get things moving along as well.
Leadership and challenges

Part of the TKA program includes weekly webinars. These are live audio and video broadcasts that you follow along with. It is pretty impressive that you can actually ask questions during these broadcasts and get direct answers as well.

Part of the challenge that Court and Mark face is in dealing with repeat questions, as well as newcomers to their program and people who have serious doubts about how it will all turn out. Most students of internet marketing would much rather think about making money online rather than put in real work and effort….and this is exactly the sort of block that Court and Mark have been learning how to overcome in the minds of their students.

It has been impressive to watch these guys evolve as teachers. You can tell that they have had moments of extreme frustration. Yet they really have been able to push beyond that and use this as an opportunity to delve into the mind of the frustrated internet entrepreneur and make it into a lesson that can help everyone. Their leadership, in this case, has pushed them to really learn what kinds of challenges are blocking their students, and how they can design challenges and goals that will produce real action and real results.

A big part of this comes into play when Court will make a breakthrough of his own, and then share it with the community, challenging them to put in the same work to replicate his efforts. He continues to push his students by pushing himself. And now, many TKA members have come up with challenges of their own in the forums, and this is the type of atmosphere that helps to incite action and promote income growth.

How TKA leadership has helped me make more money:

Like I said, I have experienced at least 2 major breakthroughs that have spurred me into action and drastically added to my bottom line. One of these was inspired by Court and the other was inspired by Mark. Each of these guys brings something unique to the table when it comes to teaching and instructing students. Obviously, Court makes his own breakthroughs in the internet marketing world and then shares his success with others, pushing them to take action and duplicate his results. Mark brings a business prowess to the table that is very professional and has actually shown me how to take my flagship website to the next level, something that I did not really believe could be achieved at first.

I don’t just subscribe to Court and Mark because I think they are nice guys or because they like my website….I do it because they have taken me all the way to $800 per month in passive income! For me, the continuing education that I get at the Keyword Academy is simply part of my business. It is a lifeline that I would be crazy to go without, as the experience thus far has multiplied my income many times over.

I am excited beyond words to look forward to the next year in internet marketing. I am so grateful that I have this level of support as I transition to a full time income online.
How To Analyze The Profit Potential Of An Online Market
March 10th, 2010 | by Court | Published in Keyword Research | 44 Comments

One of the most crucial aspects of running an online business (or an offline business that markets online) is market research. You need to know whether a market is profitable before you put time, energy, and resources into a project. People who skip this step often find themselves frustrated and it’s easy to see why. Putting hours into something that will never pay is obviously a terrible idea.

People Who Can Benefit From Understanding How Online Markets Work

* Professionals (doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, chiropractors, massage therapists, dentists, orthodontists, funeral specialists, etc) who already have sites or are thinking about setting sites up
* Casual internet marketers
* Professional marketers
* Bloggers
* E-commerce site operators
* People who are just getting started with internet marketing

How To Calculate The Profit Potential Of A Market

By looking at individual keyword phrases (the words and phrases people search for in Google) we can get a lot of insight into how money is flowing through a market. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is extremely useful for this. Let’s take a look at an example keyword phrase so that we can further illustrate.

Example #1 – Provo Dentist (as a dentist)

For our first example, let’s take a look at the phrase ‘provo dentist’. If we look at the term in the the Adwords tool, we can see that the monthly search volume is 720. This means that 720 people are searching for this term each month in Google (approximately):

If we set the tool to show ‘Estimated Avg. CPC’ (which I did) we can determine that there is a dentist somewhere (or a marketing company) in Provo who is willing to pay $3.80 per click to buy traffic from Google. If we multiply the amount of searches by the CPC (the amount these people are willing to pay to buy a click from Google), we can determine that the top advertiser is willing to spend $2736 per month to buy traffic. They probably don’t spend this much because some people will click on the listings of other advertisers, but the point is that at least this much money is changing hands. This means that we can safely assume that the market size of the online ‘provo dentist’ market is at least $2736 per month, and that’s if the dentists are breaking even. If they are making a profit (likely), the actual market size will be higher than this.

It’s extremely difficult to get 100% of the traffic for any keyword phrase in fact you would need multiple web properties to come close. If your site ranks #1 in Google, you can plan on getting around 40% of the available traffic. That means that in order to get an accurate representation of your true profit potential in a given market, you are going to need to discount, using only 40% of the original number. This would mean that we would end up with a potential of $1094 per month, assuming that we could get our site to #1 in Google. This would of course be free traffic and we could increase our share of the market by also buying some of that traffic but that’s a different story altogether.

Another factor that’s still in play is that there are other keyword phrases that are used to search for dentists in Provo. The above screen-shot shows us that. There are also people who don’t live in Provo who would probably drive to Provo to go to a dentist that they liked. Springville is five minutes away from Provo, Orem is five minutes away from Provo, Mapleton is 10 minutes away from Provo, etc.

To get a true representation of the size of a market, you would need to add up the potential for all keyword phrases that could be used to search for your service. In this case, we would need to calculate and add up the potential for the following keyword phrases: provo dentist, provo dentists, dentist in provo, dentists in provo, springville dentist, springville dentists, dentist in springville, dentists in springville, orem dentist, orem dentists, dentists in orem, dentist in orem, etc. There are probably a lot of other cities that are nearby that would work well – you would have to do the research yourself to find them.

Example #2 – Provo Dentist (as a marketer)

For our first example, we assumed that we were an actual dentist who could take on clients from the traffic. If we look at the same keywords (and the same numbers) from the viewpoint of a marketer, things will come out differently:

We are still seeing the same numbers, but now we know that we aren’t going to make all of the profits – the dentists will also need to make some of the profit or the money will obviously quit flowing.

$2736 will still be available – that calculation doesn’t change. What does change is the percentage of the profit that we can make. We will still only be able to get 40% of the traffic if we end up at #1 in Google so we’re knocked down to $1094, just like before. From there we need to discount further. There are a few ways that we can do things.

If we wanted to establish an actual relationship with a dentist in Provo, we could probably do a 50/50 split of the profits which would mean that we could make about $547 per month if we got ranked #1 for ‘provo dentist’.

In order to make this work, we would of course have to talk to dentists and find one who was willing to partner with us in this way. For those of you who aren’t comfortable with that, you would have to choose another alternative like Google Adsense.

There are certainly dentists in Provo who advertise via Google Adsense, so how can we determine our profit if we decide to put these ads on our pages? We simply discount further based on how we expect our traffic to act. Here’s how the numbers will work out (approximately of course):

* There is still $2736 on the table
* However, we can still only get 40% of the traffic (knocks us down to $1094)
* We won’t get the full CPC because Google will take a cut and we won’t always get clicks on the highest paying ad. We can only expect to get 25% of the CPC number we see in the Adwords tool. This knocks us down to $273.50.
* Also we can’t get every visitor to click on an ad. In fact, we can only plan on getting 5% (in some cases you can get more clicks but we want to be conservative in our estimate) of our visitors to click an ad. This takes us all the way down to $13.68 per month.

We would still need to compensate for the fact that there are a lot of different keyword phrases that we could use as a marketer. The Springville and Orem keyword sets would still be on the table and as a marketer, geographical location really doesn’t matter. We could target keywords for any location because Google Adsense will have advertisers in most cities. We would need to make up for our small piece of the earnings pie by putting a lot of keywords together and getting traffic with all of them.

Uses Of This Skill Set

We of course can use these skills in a number of ways. A dentist could use these numbers to determine the relative value of a marketing company that’s offering their services. Any other service professional could of course do the same. On top of that, if a service professional was willing to pick up a new set of skills they could take care of their own marketing and pocket all of the money that would be available (in this case that’s $1094 per month – not a fortune but this would of course compound as the client came for additional work and referred friends). After a few years it’s likely that income would build nicely. Remember that our numbers are also very conservative here. We are assuming that the advertisers who are willing to buy the traffic are only breaking even. If they make a profit, there’s more profit to be made.

Marketers can of course use this type of market analysis to determine the profit potential of any keyword phrase or market that they want to enter. This saves them the time and hassle of creating web properties that don’t have little potential. Keep in mind that this methodology can be used for any keyword phrase or for any combination of keyword phrases. Marketers could also use this skill to sell ad space to the dentist (or of course any other service provider). By showing them the profit potential of the keywords, it could be easier to sell an ad. By cutting out Google you could get a larger share of profits. A dentist who can see that they have the potential to make over $1000 per month from a ranking would definitely be willing to spend $200 per month to buy ad space.

Questions About The Method?

If you have any questions about this method of market analysis, please let me know in the comments. I want to help each of you to understand this process as much as I possibly can.

source :http://thekeywordacademy.com/
Posted by howmakemoneyonline at 12:07 PM