Monday, May 21, 2012

Week 1 - Learning

This week I have:


  • Surfed the web for several hours on product creation and search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Discussed with the WebServerGuru
  • Analyzed how I could most efficiently produce value and to whom
  • Worked on my skills (2 books read)


At the beginning of the week I did some random web surfing on how to drive traffic to my future passive income stream sites. I freaked out when I found out all my blogs have names that are not search engine optimized and as I am using Blogger I cannot even use the SEO-plugins that are available for WordPress.

Fortunately I also had a quick meeting with the WebServerGuru. I did mention him earlier, he is the one who is helping me update my programming skills for the web development. He gave me two books to read on technologies/tools that I want/need to learn. I just finished reading the books and they were both great reads.

He also gave me a very brief introduction to Search Engine Optimization and he made it sound much less scary than the guys who are in a profession of selling me tools and courses to do that. He said that it mostly boils down to carefully selecting a small enough set of keywords for my site that I will then consistently repeat in my site content. Before that I first need to check with Google Keyword Tool that the words I select have enough searches, but that they are not too popular and thus have too much competition to beat. I should repeat those words in the URLs that I use, image names and in the content I create. I also need to get people to link to my site and if they use my keywords in the link, the better. I can get started by linking to my site from my other pages, but I must be careful not to make circular links. I can also try posting to forums, social media and blogs. He also said that getting traffic by repeating the keywords in hidden content, like invisible html tags or with white font on white background are maybe not worth it and if done too much one can get caught on using them. Overall, that does not sound too hard! I do know I have lot to learn still.

While surfing I visited Unicorn Free blog. Amy is an author of Java Performance Rocks book and she is living on passive income, coming from her software, books and courses. She has a passive income system that resembles the one I want to build and she managed to get hers up quite fast. So I was thrilled that she is starting a course on product creation on June and she has sample course material in her blog. Unfortunately that course costs almost $3000. But the samples are free and after I read those I got my first good product idea. So I really recommend reading the samples. They will help you not become a slave to your ideas. I have not yet decided if I will try to apply to the course. I think the course is horribly expensive, but on the other hand I've seen and been on more expensive ones with less content than she is already giving out for free - I just have not been the one paying them! (Edit: looks like I might be late too, probably all the seats are taken already!)

I've also (of course) read Steve's suggestion to start thinking how I could produce something of value. The most obvious way for me would be to continue doing what I am already doing now - programming. But I could also teach people and I'm good at learning new things myself, so there are plenty of options for me.

2 comments: