Feb 2013 - I've Got Money And I've Got Business Ideas

Passive Income In February 2013: $45 
Costs: $30

Another great month is behind. My course investments are starting to pay off.

Both SBI! and 30x500 have been winner's choices for me. If you don't know these courses, there's more info in my Resources Page.

Site-Build-It!

Most of the money in February came from my SBI! site. The one I've neglected since 30x500 started.

The SBI! does say that it takes about half a year to make any money with it. Even though I've completed only 8/10 of this course, it has still kept its promises.

My site has only 16 articles and I've done no link-building for a long time.

For some reason unknown to me, I jumped up in Google ranks 2 weeks ago. I now have 1500 unique visitors per month and several of my long tail keywords rank in the first page.

The best thing is that these new visitors don't bother mailing me before they buy. So I'm concentrating on 30x500 and just watching the money flow in.

Admittedly, this stream is small and it's potential is not very big. But I'm proud of every penny I make online and SBI! was a good learning experience that prepared me for 30x500.

30x500

Business ideas are flowing in, thanks to 30x500 process. During the last couple of weeks, I've had several good business ideas. The best thing about these ideas is that there is a high probability people want these products and they are willing to pay for them.

I have not yet selected the final business idea, but I've selected my audience and my business "theme":

I'm going to help bootstrapped micro-businesses with their financial and accounting problems.

I had "forgotten" that I have BBA and several years of experience in small biz accounting. Truth to be told, I didn't think those skills would be of much use - except for taking care of my own finances. Fortunately, 30x500 dig them up and pointed out that small businesses often need help in that area.

I have to refresh my old skills so I'll not be able to start by creating a SaaS as a hoped. But I'll be happy to start by creating info-products for this awesome audience. That will also show me what the demand for extra services really is.

I'm looking forward to what happens in next month. I hope you had a good biz month too!

Is Affiliate Marketing Illegal?

No, affiliate marketing is not illegal. But to my surprise lots of people don't know that.


Showing Off My New Site

I'm pretty proud of my new SiteBuildIt! site. Although I've been blogging for several years, it is my first "real site". The articles are thoroughly thought out, unique and well written. So I have been showing it to my friends and relatives. I was amazed to find out they don't share my feelings.


Is It Legal?

First thing everyone asks is how I'll earn money with my site. When I tell them about affiliate marketing, they all get suspicious and ask if it is legal.


Pyramid Schemes Are Illegal

My friend asked me "is this some kind of pyramid scheme thing?". Those are illegal in plenty of countries.

But SBI and affiliate marketing are not pyramid schemes.

In pyramid scheme you'll have to pay to join in, but you don't receive anything concrete. You'll main job will be to get new recruits and you'll get paid when people join in. That is the whole business, even though some schemes have some "bonus" that is supposed to be paid when a certain amount of people have joined in. Other disguise as multi-level marketing by having some product tangled in.

As the pyramid scheme would require exponential amount of participants, it is destined to crash. The few people in the bottom of the pyramid get rich and the mass of the people joining later will just get cheated.


Multi-level Marketing (MLM) Is Legal

Multi-level marketing is a marketing strategy where you benefit from both your own sales and the sales that your recruits make. You all will be selling a real product and MLM is legal.

The problem is, many pyramid schemes disguise themselves as multi-level marketing. Fraud.org has this excellent table that compares pyramid schemes and MLM. As you can see, it may be sometimes hard to separate a real MLM program from an illegal pyramid scheme.


SiteBuildIt! Is Legal

As said, SBI sites and affiliate marketing are not pyramid schemes. Most of them are not MLM either, as you will only get paid for the products that people buy through your links. You don't earn more if others end up being affiliates themselves.

I do recall that in SBI affiliate program there is a small "second level" payment too, but real MLM programs are several levels deep. Also, getting new affiliates is not the SBI main business. SBI is a course that teaches people to build profitable web businesses. You can buy SBI and never become an affiliate.

Of course, SBI site owners are individuals and nothing prevents them from being fooled joining into a pyramid scheme! So when selecting your affiliate programs, be careful.


Undercover Marketing Is Illegal

My sister asked if my site contains undercover marketing, also called stealth marketing. Undercover marketing is illegal, at least in European Union countries, such as UK and Finland.

But my site does not contain undercover marketing either.

There has been a big buzz on undercover marketing in blogs lately. It seems that bloggers may become guilty of undercover marketing when they write reviews of products that they got for free. If you write a positive review, but do not mention that you did not pay for the product - well, that's undercover marketing.


What, Huh! Are You Serious?

Yes, that's what I thought too. I think that is ridiculous. If you receive a gift, you can opt to write a negative review or decide to skip reviewing the product altogether. Isn't that enough to ensure that the reader does not get cheated? Apparently not.

Most actors and other famous people get most of their clothes from fashion houses yet they are not required to sport "I got my clothes for free"-tag on their forehead. And you are not either - except online.

I do agree that some companies use really nasty stealth marketing techniques. For example, one phone company hired people to flirt in public places. They tried to trick people to try out a certain phone model. The employee flirted with the customer and if they were successful, they asked the customers to enter their phone numbers into their phone. And as they were hired to do that, people never got called.

Anyway, affiliates pay for the products they promote/recommend. So affiliates are not quilty of undercover marketing.

But that did not satisfy my sister. Next she asked if affiliate marketing itself is illegal.


Affiliate Marketing Is Legal

Affiliate marketing is completely legal. You are allowed to promote and recommend products that you like.

Some programs and countries do require that you clearly mention your affiliate status.

I don't see that as a problem, even though that might scare some people who don't know a thing about affiliate programs. They will get suspicious and dismiss your opinions. But doing that they will lose, not you.

There are some rumors going on that some US states have forbidden affiliate programs. But that is not quite true. Those states got greedy and announced Amazon that they want to collect taxes of the affiliate earnings coming to their states. Amazon's answer was to discontinue affiliate programs in those states. Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Connecticut are the ones I know of.

While that was Amazon's answer I think the affiliate programs will eventually get taxed. We'll see.


People Are Still Going To Be Suspicious

Even though affiliate marketing is not illegal, people will continue to be suspicious. I think my sister still is!

I told her that if she wants to "fight" affialiate programs, she can start by boycotting the biggest companies offering affiliate programs - Amazon and Ebay.

I don't think my other relatives and friends are going to make it easy either. Whatever I do online, I think my mother-in-law is still going to ask me "do you have any real work yet?" every time I meet her.

PS. I'm officially still on vacation, so no week reports!

Midway Battle - SBI! vs GRWeB 3.0

I just reached midway in both SiteBuildIt! and Getting Rich With eBooks 3.0. I have promised you a review, so..  Let's make them battle!

Yes, I know this is not an even fight. SiteBuildIt! is an all-inclusive passive income business building program, while Getting Rich With eBooks is a course for making best-selling ebooks. But, for a newbie they stand almost on the same line.

"I want to start earning passive income online - tell me what to do!" - They both promise to deliver that.

Also, SiteBuildIt! costs $299 per year and Getting Rich With eBooks 3.0 costs $400. So why not compare them?


Time required - Winner: Getting Rich With eBooks 3.0

I used about 40 hours to reach the midway in SiteBuildIt!

Reaching midway in Getting Rich With eBooks took me 8-10 hours.


Getting things done - Winner: SiteBuildIt!

After SiteBuildIt! day 5 I have:

• Preliminary site map for my future site. That is, plans for 57 pages with SEO-friendly keywords
• Draft for my site's home page. It is not search engine optimized yet, but otherwise ready
• A domain. Included in the price, it is registered and ready for me
• Learned a lot on copy writing and search engine optimization
• Learned how to evaluate my ideas
• Knowledge that my site has commercial potential
• Monetization plan for my site

After video 4 of Getting Rich With eBooks I have:

• Homework to write the whole book
• Homework to invent a top-selling book title
• Homework to buy a domain
• Homework to design graphics for my book and web site OR to hire a designer to do that
• Homework to check legalities around my subject OR to hire a lawyer to do that
• Learned how to evaluate my ideas
• Learned some valuable tips and tricks about eBook writing and publishing 
• Knowledge that my idea has commercial potential

In SiteBuildIt! you'll do the work during the course, not as an extra homework. It is like a parent holding your hand when you have to face something scary. Whenever it is time to do something, it says: "Do it now and then come back to me".

In Getting Rich With eBooks you'll watch the video first and then you get an assignment for the next week. After the first 3 videos I felt that the homework was reasonable. The video went through the information needed to do the tasks. But the fourth video was different. It skimmed through an awfully large topic - writing a book, and then gave an assignment to write it. Now I have a horrible list of homework to do.


Extra costs - Winner: SiteBuildIt!

When I joined these courses, I did expect to have some extra costs. I expected that I need to buy a domain and get some graphics for my site/book.

SiteBuildIt! gave me a nice surprise gift - the domain is included in the price. Not only that, also the WordTracker credits needed for keyword research were included. So I now have this impression that with SiteBuildIt! there might not be any extra costs for me at all. We'll see.

Getting Rich With eBooks gave me a disappointment - it suggests that I should hire several experts to help me with different issues. Well, it does say that I can do them myself too, but that it is not worth it. I assume Vic is right here. It may not be worth it to do everything yourself. But it sure would have been nice to know there are so many extra costs *before* I joined the course.


Simplicity - Winner: Getting Rich With eBooks

SiteBuildIt! will overwhelm you at the start. You'll get this feeling that it pours so much information to you that you'll choke. It has its own concepts, abbreviations and tools. And you'll lose some precious time learning them. But on the other hand, the tools save you a lot of time.

Getting Rich With eBooks is not complex. It tells you the minimum what you'll need to do and then asks you to do that. Simple tasks after another. The downside is that you'll start to wonder if the course really told you everything that is important. If it does, he offers nice counterbalance to SBI! Maybe all those well planned steps are not required to succeed. If it doesn't... well, then your chances of succeeding may be smaller.


Worth per penny - Winner: Who knows?

Worth is very hard to evaluate. It might have been either of these two courses that gave me the critical piece of information. If you take the opportunity, I think one can succeed with either of these programs.

However, I do think Getting Rich With eBooks costs too much compared to what I have got from it this far. Especially taken into account that it contains very little information that SiteBuildIt! wouldn't have.

I bought SiteBuildIt! with the monthly subscription option. It costs me $30 per month and I think it is reasonable priced. However, if you don't know how to transfer domains and web pages away from SiteBuildIt! system, they will charge you the monthly subscription price for as long as your site is up.



Worst this far

In SiteBuildIt! the worst is definitely "The Way of The Tortoise". Everything proceeds so slowly!

Another thing that I have grown a bit annoyed is the repetition and constant material over-delivery. They want to make sure that everybody surely get the main points. I feel that is a bit outdated thinking and would prefer more condensed course, implemented in a way that I would not feel that I'd miss something important if I took the shorter route. But both of my problems here are just minor annoyances.

In Getting Rich With eBooks the worst for me is the lack of trust. It feels like I would be dealing with a car salesman. Can I trust what he says?

Also, the videos are of poor quality. They are not cut in any way, even to hide the technical problems they had in the live courses where the recording was made. I'm not really interested in waiting 15 minutes if someone raises her hand or not. While in SiteBuildIt! the slowness comes from the huge amount of study material, in Getting Rich With eBooks the slowness comes from laziness. This man supposedly sold eBooks for million dollars, yet he cannot afford to get his videos properly edited.



Best this far

SBI! has removed the pressure from my project. I don't need to hassle around, worry and get everything ready today. With this program, it is easy to believe that I will succeed. But it may take a bit longer than I expected. Fortunately, there is still plenty of time before my goal deadline.

That is my best benefit, but then, I am a programmer with over 10 years of experience. I'd bet that most people would say that the best thing in SiteBuildIt! is that it frees you to concentrate on the business. It handles all the technicalities for you so you can focus on the issues where the money is.

Getting Rich With eBooks has taught me an effective way to do simple keyword research. Even though I now have all the nice tools that SiteBuildIt! offers, I still do quick sanity checks for the main keywords using Vic's method. Simple, fast and easy.

Another great thing in Getting Rich With eBooks is the Affirmations Audio. That 20-minute recording is a work of art. It has perfect affirmations needed to succeed in a passive income project. I do have my own affirmations, but I really like these. I still listen to this audio almost every day.


Conclusion

I think SiteBuildIt! is the winner for me, no doubt there. I feel that it will teach me everything I need to know about passive income web business. If something, it may teach me too much!

I also like that in SiteBuildIt! I can access all the information there is after the initial $30 payment. You cannot access all the tools right away, but that is not needed. Right now I feel that the biggest reason for Getting Rich With eBooks to hide parts of the course is that if people would be able to see everything right away, they might turn back and never return.

At the end of my first review I thought that Getting Rich With eBook did offer value for a newbie. But then I found SiteBuildIt! Of course, they work on a bit different subjects, but this far Getting Rich With eBooks has contained very little information that is not available in SiteBuildIt!

If after all this you are still interested in Getting Rich With eBooks, here is my advice:

Pay the initial $12, watch the available two videos and download Vic's keyword research excel. Also get the affirmations audio. After that, evaluate the situation again! Do you really want to continue? If not, just remember to cancel your subscription so that they don't continue charging you. 

Right now I'm really exited about SiteBuildIt! It is a solid program. It is so good that I am thinking whether or not I should buy a one year subscription for my sister as her birthday gift.

My second advice to you is:

Visit SBI! Order Page right away and take their monthly subscription option. That will give you access to a goldmine of passive income study material and still leaves you a nice way out if you find out that the program is not for you. They do have 90 day money back guarantee too, so there really is no risk seeing the course material.

Even though I no longer recommend Getting Rich With eBooks, I'm not resigning either. There are 4 videos more even though the eBook is (or should be) ready already. Vic has several times mentioned how important the steps after the book creation are, so I am really eager to hear what he has to offer. But you'll have to wait some time for the next review... it will take me some time to write the book!

Overall, I'm glad that I have two programs instead of just one. It gives me some perspective on what things are really important to earn passive income online.

SBI - Why People Fail?

Oh, I laughed SO hard.

... but my laughter did not last long. Intelligence is not the only thing I need to get through SBI!

The above picture is from the SiteBuildIt! course material called Why People Fail. There is also another material that goes through the biggest mistakes people make while on SBI! I was surprised to find out that the biggest mistake of them all was not to get past first 5 modules of the course. There are 10 modules in the course and over 40% of the people don't get to the module 5.

But sure enough, after couple of hours studying I knew myself why that is the case. I was feeling completely overwhelmed! There is just so much material. Videos and pages contain link after link that you can follow, and the forums contain years and years of posts. If you follow all the links you will be gone for days!

I always like to read all material of the courses that I attend to, but I need to make an exception now. Fortunately the course came with a checklist that helps me find out when I have gotten enough out of the modules to proceed.

I also made some rules for myself:

1. Only follow links from videos if they are relevant right now
2. Don't follow links to the forum while watching the videos
3. Use the checklist - when you've checked all boxes for the day/module, the day is done - no more reading 
4. Only go to the forum when you have specific information to find or problem to solve

Still, by the middle of the module two I was weeping. I had just tried BrainStormIt! for the first time and it either gave me errors or omitted the keywords that I wanted to get info from. Every successful search subtracted from my search credits (I had 25 to start with). If they run out, I'll have to buy new ones.

I am not a person who gets easily overwhelmed by courses or information. And I am definitely not a person that cries if a software does not co-operate with me. After all, for over 10 years my work have been to solve problems and write software. I have written software more complex than any of these SEO tools. I have fixed bugs in them. I have solved other people's problems using them.

I was weeping since the buy credits made it impossible for me to find out the correct way to use to tool by just trying it out. I was weeping since I knew what a swamp of information I'd need to wallow through to find out what was wrong. I was weeping since I had just paid to get nearly 500 garbage keywords into my keyword list that I'd need to sort out later - item by item. I was weeping since I was tired after watching and reading the course materials for over 4 hours straight.

After using 45 minutes reading support page after another I gave up and wrote a post to the forum. Next morning the answer was there waiting for me and I'm ready to go again. Yay! After all, there was a check box in the checklist that said: "I will reach humps along the way and beat them". And I checked that box.

Right now, even after these little obstacles, I am so glad I joined this course. I should have done it already earlier. SBI! is a solid no-nonsense course that I believe will work if one is ready to work for it. 

The only problem I see this far is that its creator believes in OVER-delivering content. While that is a great strategy to make your site popular and get people to return there time after time, it is not maybe the best strategy for learning new things. I'd rather see a course that contains just the key points and action steps. It annoys me that there are so many SomethingIt!-tools and 3-letter abbreviations made up just for this course. But I believe this course will help me reach my targets and that is what really matters.

I wish resilience for all the people who are taking this same course right now! We CAN do it!

$1000 Passive Income Site Walkthrough

Meet Becky Turner, a successful affiliate.

At May 1012 she made $7000 from her affiliate business that includes several sites. Most of her income comes from her site that sells her own eBook, Lucid Dreaming Fast Track. But I am more interested in her site called Improve Vision Naturally that earns her $1000-1500 per month. That is the income range I am targeting now. At the time Allan interviewed Becky that site had 13.000 unique visitors per month. 

When I first saw her page my first impression was - I could do that too! I know a product that changed my life too. At that time her site was looking much different than today though. It had just a fraction of the content that it has today. What it tells me? Start small, test the concept, make it larger later.

As Becky started with SBI! this is a perfect learning opportunity for me. Becky is well into her business, so I will not hurt her by analyzing her site. Can I spot what is really important?

Timeline

When evaluating things in the web it is well worth checking how old the information is. In this case, I want to know when Becky started and how long it took her to build up the site.

Becky's domain was registered 2008 and the site of the product she advertises, Rebuild Your Vision, was registered 2002. Ten years and still going strong. As we can see here, good info-products can have a long life!

What Problem Becky Solves?

Her site is an honest review of a course that helps people to improve their vision with eye exercises. A lots of people are searching for help on this issue, but many of them go for laser surgeries. Becky wants to help people who want to try natural remedies first.

Market Research - Is The Problem Worth Solving? 

I expected to work hard to find out Becky's keywords, but I just needed to open the html and it gives me the following keyword list:

"eye exercises, improve vision naturally, better vision naturally, improve vision, nearsightedness, vision exercises, Rebuild Your Vision"

Let's see how Google ranks Becky's site for those searches. Here are all the searches that show Becky's site on the first 2 pages of results:

Improve vision naturally - 9900 searches per month - Becky's site is 6th in the results
Better vision naturally    - 4400 searches per month - Becky's site is 7th in the results
Rebuild your vision        - 2400 searches per month - Becky's YouTube video is 2nd in the results

She has keywords listed that have 50.000-90.000 searches per month, but those above are the keywords that actually show her site. Of course, as she works to put more content to her site, she may eventually be able to tap to those larger searches too.

I don't think that these searches are able to get her all of that 13.000 people per month. That would mean almost everybody searching for those keywords would go to Becky's site. I'm guessing she has some other means to drive traffic to her site that I just cannot see now.

I am quite surprised that a successful passive income site can be built on a topic that has this little searches. What a great inspiration!

I did a full market research for these keywords using method Vic describes in his Getting Rich With eBooks course that I am on now. All the results don't fit here and I will not bore you with them, but I do want to mention one thing. It does not really matter if you get a lot of visitors, if they are not in a buying mindset. Only visitors that are going to buy matter. Becky has succeeded in picking keywords that bring in people who want to buy something.

How To Monetize It - The Affiliate Program

The affiliate program that Becky uses is here: http://www.rebuildyourvision.com/affiliates/. She gets $25 per sale. For $1500 per month that means 60 sales. 60 out of 13.000 is 0,5%

If you have been using large scale affiliate programs, like Amazon Affiliates, the provision may look high to you. But in ebooks they just often are that high. 

You also may have thought that more people would buy. Well, as I said that depends on the audience and I think 0,5% is well done. So on a topic like this that is what I can expect to have myself. Or maybe a bit less. Becky is a writer by profession and I assume English is her native language.

Next Step - Just Do It

This is how far my current skills get me. Of course I could also analyze the structure of her web page or the content on it, but I'll leave that to later. I'll do it when I am writing my own site.

Some time ago I would have just started writing it right away. And yes, I did the market research for my topic already. But this time I am going to let other people help me. That will dramatically increase my chance for success. I don't want to take any more rounds of trying and making stupid little mistakes that crash my project.

So instead of tackling this myself, I'm going to go to the SBI! order page and join the course. No more waiting, I'm doing it right now.