Build a residual income stream from your home

What is special about a residual income in comparison to a one-time income for a task completed? The basic difference is that if you get paid on a recurring basis for a one-time effort, it is equivalent to getting paid for free, as you do nothing after that initial effort. But in the case of other income generating businesses you slog it out for each payment.

In home based business opportunities, often you come across opportunities that pay you over and over for the good start you make once for a residual income. Most residual income programs pay you for your one-time effort as many others follow you and you get a part of the revenue generated by them. That is, you first select a workable genuine opportunity and recruit others to duplicate the work you have done. There are many multilevel marketing schemes (MLM), affiliate programs and similar others that pay you on a residual income plan.

If such a residual income program is selected by you and you recruit other affiliates who will spend several hours a week to promote the sales plan, you are on your way to successfully building a residual income stream. This kick starts one downline stream of income. Similarly, if you can have ten or more people who spend hundreds of hours a week, you have created a powerful residual income business for yourself, with those ten or more streams working for you.

This works perfectly in most affiliate programs, work at home opportunities, MLMs and many similar money making schemes. Essentially these programs are devised by companies to sell products and services. They basically eliminate middlemen like wholesalers, retailers and others and market their products directly. The difference between the ex-factory price and the market price for most products is huge. So, this price difference is shared in a structured payout plan that brings you a steady residual income, by way of commissions.

Though you may come across free-to-join residual income programs, you have to be cautious as your time and efforts may be wasted as such programs cannot generate incomes as there is no sale or visible income. Similarly, if the program over-emphasizes on excessive recruiting, and there are no products on sales, be cautious as it can be an illegal Ponzi Scheme or chain letter scheme.

One way to make sure that you join a legally valid, genuine residual income program is to check out the past history of the promoting company. If they are already established with a good track record of growing business and timely payouts, you can be sure that you found the right residual income program.

Video: Honest Blogging

As is known there has been quite a lot of discussion about the influence of gifts and other inducements to bloggers from sites and companies they blog about. This follows as FTC (The Federal Trade Commission) has taken interest in regulation of bloggers whose opinions can be influenced by gifts and payments.

In a recent conference, bloggers talk about how responsible they are and how honest they are about their opinions. Listen to what the blogger says in the video above.

Whatever this blogger may say, bloggers who review products for a consideration cannot say the product is bad, even if it is bad. They shall not be paid if they write so. What a blogger writes about a product is equal to advertising and it is at par with any other form of advertising. It is common knowledge. And no body can say they are honest in publishing such reviews.

Most of the bloggers publish in their blogs a general disclosure policy saying that they accept money for writing product reviews and they also claim that it won’t affect their views or the opinions expressed by them. This in essence is just a blank statement that does not carry any meaning just because no body pays for negative advertising.

So the claim that the opinion of the bloggers is not influenced by payment is just a lie, may be to complete some legal formality. For the same reason the Disclosure Policy itself is dishonest, as you cannot strictly go by your published policy!

10 tips to keep your income steady

In my previous post on multiple income streams I touched upon some problems the small guy with a blog may face. But not only the blogger but anyone, for that matter with a single source of income, can be at financial trouble at any time for no mistake of that person. For example, due to recession, in a very short period of the last six months, millions of people lost their jobs. Many people are already in financial trouble and many people had to even sell their homes. But even out of those who lost their jobs, those who planned for the rainy day did not face much trouble. Now let us see what the small guy on the Internet can face and the possible solutions.

1. You can lose PageRank for many reasons, like excessive use of links without “nofollow” tags in posts, when you do not post anything continually, when you do not have enough backlinks, etc. So, wherever possible, use nofollow tags within posts, post some good content almost every day, exchange links, visit forums and other blogs and leave your messages with your links that will account for excellent one-way backlinks. This will make sure that you do not lose your PageRank.
   
2. After you lose PageRank, don’t cry over it! Try to find out why you lost PR. If you cannot find out yourself, seek the help of some knowledgeable friend and find out. You do not lose everything with loss of PR. Your blog still has some value. Continue working on it, avoiding mistakes that cost your ranking. Unless you committed a grave mistake, you will be surprised to see that you get back ranking again, very soon.
   
3. Always anticipate losses! Losses can happen any time for any reason, including PageRank and all the income from your blog. So, be prepared for that. Instead of spending all the time on one blog or site, keep two or three. It is quite unlikely that all the three lose PR and everything. So, if you lose on one, you have two others to depend on. This you have to do till you professionally and financially grow so that you can hire services to grow further, spend on advertising, etc.
   
4. Use different themes and contents for different blogs. If you are blogging on different topics in one blog, classify your posts, like marketing, computers, entertainment, etc., and post the relevant topics in the blogs assigned for them. It helps in another way because the keywords used for one blog’s topic will bring more traffic and income than the other blog that uses less paying keywords.
   
5. Use different income streams. If you depend on only content based advertising like AdSense now, consider some affiliate marketing programs that can run side by side with AdSense. If you do not use AdSense or similar programs, immediately start using them because these are free to join and bring you money even when you sleep. Even if you earn one dollar a day, it is better than earning nothing.
   
6. Use your accounts at Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr etc., to drive traffic to your blog or site. You can place your links in all these to invite the attention of your visitors there.
   
7. You can try to start a FREE service site offering free advertising and free stuff. The word FREE itself is income generating business because it attracts a lot of visitors, the so called freebie hunters. People will place a lot of free ads giving you valuable content. This content can help you make good amount of money from advertising. Free article sites, free directories, etc., are examples.
   
8. If you are good in writing, offer writing and editing services to other sites and businesses. There is a great demand for writers who can write something meaningful on any subject without grammar and spelling mistakes. You can charge for your content based on the quality of your writing.
   
9. Start a link building service. There are many people making money from this, because, sites that make a lot of money do not have the time for link building activities. You can charge for every link that you place for them in forums, blogs, social media, etc. that permit placing such links.
   
10. If you are already earning money from your blog, consider spending a part of the earning for advertising and marketing, using programs like AdWords, email marketing, etc. Spend less but smartly and intelligently to bring traffic to the same site that earns you money. That will increase your present income into multiples.
    

If the tips here appeal to you please leave your comments.

Why should you have multiple income streams?

Have you heard the old adage, “Don’t put all your eggs into one basket?” Well, that’s it. Most people don’t do it. Just because if the basket is somehow tumbled, all your eggs are gone!

But it happens quite often to the small guy with a blog, trying to make some pocket money or a living from her/his blog. Most of them work hard to build backlinks, a decent number of visitors, a decent PageRank, and makes some money from content based advertising programs like Google AdSense or promoting some affiliate programs. But it does not happen to the established bloggers who make quite big fortunes from their blogs, for obvious reasons. That is, unlike most of us, they know the Do’s and Don’ts of blogging.

One fine morning everything is gone, as either the PageRank is demoted, or disqualified from the ad program or affiliate program. Most often the loss of PageRank is enough to pull down all else, because PageRank is the most important factor to get visitors from searches.

Once this happens, there will be a big howl, “Oh! I lost my PR, I did not do anything wrong, blah… blahblah… blah…”. Sorry, I am a bit cynical. I have to be because, basically, I am not a blogger, and I started blogging while trying to promote something else. Because it gave me some results for whatever I was trying to achieve, and a little bit of money too I continue blogging.

I knew about how you can gain PageRank and also how you can lose PageRank, though Google’s algorithms are a closely kept secret. I know it by reading Google guidelines, from SEO forums, my own experience and the experience of fellow bloggers like some of you who may be reading this post. In fact, I learned a lot from my fellow bloggers, most of them helping me too in many ways.

I have lost PR, regained it for the same site or blog, and I keep other options if I lose PR. I keep multiple blogs and sites so that when I lose some where, I gain somewhere else. So, I don’t cry, but keep working, as usual, as if nothing happened. That pays me.

Also, note that it is very easy to gain PR for blogs, as also it is very easy to lose PR, unlike regular sites. As it will be quite lengthy to write everything here, I will put the rest of the story in my next post. Come back soon!

Economics of aging population

With the Chinese Government urging the residents of Shanghai to have a second child, after three decades of pursuing the one-child policy, indications are directing at the population aging in China that will place about one-third of urban Chinese becoming 60 or above by 2020. This would greatly reduce the proportion of working people, in relation to the retired or otherwise nonworking population in China.

This is something what is called population ageing, a highly generalized process, most advanced in highly developed countries, and to some extent affecting most countries. Population ageing has slowed down in countries of Europe and some other well developed countries, but it will now hit some of the Asian economies and elsewhere where economic development is faster.

Two generalized causes for rising percentage of aging population are rising life expectancy and declining fertility. Development and greater availability of wealth for the masses increase life expectancy rates and longevity. It increases the average age of the population by raising the number of years that each person is old relative to number of years in which he is young.

A decline in fertility increases the average age of the population, as the rate birth comes down drastically compared to a rapidly falling death rate. These are two strong economic forces as lesser number of children means lesser expenditure on education and other aspects for the governments and parents (a good thing now but bad for the future), and older population increases state expenditure on healthcare, pensions and other state benefits for older people.

Of these two forces, it is declining fertility that is the dominant contributor to population ageing in the world today, especially in the developed countries. It is more disadvantageous for the economy as there won’t be enough working population that contributes to economic growth.

Asia and Europe are the two regions where a significant number of countries will have to face severe population ageing in the near future. Many countries will face a situation where the largest population component will be over 65 and average age will be approaching 50.

There are many economic implications associated with the ageing population. Older people often have higher accumulated savings per head than younger people. But older persons may be spending less on consumer goods. This will result in lesser demand for such goods and lesser profits, productivity and employment for people in such sectors. Incidentally consumer sector contributes one of the largest percentages in GDP of any nation. In other words, such economies can do badly compared to nations with a higher percentage of working population.

Depending on the age ranges at which the changes occur, an ageing population may result in lower interest rates and the economic benefits of lower inflation. But lower inflation need not be an indicator of financial health of a nation as lower inflation often can be a result of lesser demands for goods and services that contribute more to the GDP. An example is the case of countries like India where there is a negative inflation or deflation, but the prices of daily consumption goods like food items increase and the people are compelled to spend more as in a high inflation.

Population ageing would present governments with hard choices between higher taxes, reweighing of tax from earnings to consumption and a reduced government role in providing healthcare. Whenever there are financial crises, like the present recession, governments tend to take stringent measures to save the economies from total collapse. The consequences of these financial measures will be felt more in the future than now. It is a hard truth that most f us do not like many economy-saving measures introduced by the governments, most notably in the US, and in UK where economists are of the opinion that it will take at least five years for the country to limp back to normal.

Attracting More Advertiser Spend : AdSense Video

In this video, as part of Google’s educational series, Speeding Up in a Slowdown, you can hear some highly useful monetization tips and optimization tips from Christian Ashlock, AdSense Optimization Team Manager at Google, about attracting additional advertiser spend. In order to read the complete tips on AdSense from Google AdSense Team, you can visit the series at www.google.com/ads/speedingup.

According to Christian Ashlock, ‘once you create a site with great content and great ad inventory, the best way to earn additional revenue is to make sure advertisers can find you’. He shares with you two tips to help attract advertisers to spend money on your site, and a third tip to help you access a new pool of advertisers you may not currently be reaching, Search Advertisers by displaying Google Search units in your sites, blogs or forums.

If you have any questions or suggestions, you can express them as comments at www.google.com/ads/speedingup.

Solar eclipse seen in India and Asia on July 22, 2009

Video: How Google Friend Connect Works

This video shows how Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. This means more people engaging more deeply with your website - and with each other. In this video, Google Product Marketing Manager Mendel Chuang gives a short introduction to Google Friend Connect. Watch the video and start using Friend Connect for more traffic.

What is duplicate content?

Development of anything, even inventions and development of technologies have a few funny things in common. The funniest of them is that NOTHING is original. In fact all the latest technology that we use to day are copied ideas that are developed further by someone and given to us as original for which he/she claims the copyright and the title as the inventor. In fact the originals were so crude that we would laugh at them today. This is particularly true of the development of the computer, Internet, all the technologies that are related to Internet and the computer.

If we agree on this concept that the newest technologies are only copies of what already existed and improved upon, why is there all the fuss over duplicate content on the Internet? The fight against duplicate content and ridiculing and penalization of duplicate content has its roots in Google’s programs and policies. If your site has duplicate content and if it is detected by Google and other search engines that follow Google’s model, it is the worst crime that you can do on Internet.

If you use duplicate content you will lose your PageRank, your site will go deep down from the first or second pages of SERPs, and you will lose all your traffic that comes from organic searches and the only the traffic from your own efforts and direct visitors will remain. That otherwise means, you will be left with less than 10% of your traffic. Rightly so, because for many sites the 50% to 90% of the traffic come from Google searches alone.

It also means if you were making $1000 a day, by the time you sleep and wake up your earning per day will dip to $100, and $100 will come down to $10, and so on. What is your crime? Duplicate content on your site, for which you cannot complain to anyone!

And now let us find out what is duplicate content about which all the experts and Google’s own policies and practice will give you contradicting views and explanations.

Suppose you copy what is in this post and use it on your site, it is definitely duplicate content in your site and we all know about it. We all object to it too. So Google is right in punishing “cut and paste” specialists.

And still funniest thing is if you cut and paste my original content, you will go scot-free and I may be punished for duplicate content! Is it possible? Definitely yes, and it is happening!

Let us take the analogy of events. I post this article first. You like it and cut and paste it in your site or blog; some others too do so from your blog or mine. So, you will find the same post in a few sites/blogs. Generally, I may never know this. But the search engine crawler can immediately recognize duplicates. The crawler will read this article first in your blog, then in other blogs and may be in my blog as the last copy. Who is likely to get punished for duplicate content in your view? Strangely and sadly, the original writer can be branded as a shameless copycat!

Is there any remedy? Can it be proved that I am the original writer? Yes, from the logs of the servers and the time of posting it can be proved that I am the original author. But it is a lengthy and rather very difficult process to convince the search engines.

Further, the idea contained herein is NOT original. You too might have had the same thoughts before. You too may write abut it. Is it possible? Yes, it is possible. If so, will it not be duplicate content? No, not even Google will say so. That is because you started from an idea, developed it, used your own words, and the sequence of ideas will be different, and it is possible even all the points may not be the same.

So, what is bad? Is it duplicating ideas, or duplicating words, or duplicating paragraphs, or the whole content? Let me know your take on this! And look for more posts on duplicate contents in my next posts.

Development of Article Marketing

The manufacturer of a popular consumer product knows many things better about it than a consumer or others. Similarly, the creator of an art or entertainment product knows better about his/her creation than all others, including its positive and negative qualities. All others, including critics, can know about them only from an outsider’s point of view and many things they know would be guesswork and need not be true. Sometimes the opinions expressed by outsiders in the articles can be highly misleading and biased. For this reason, newspapers, magazines, etc. used to publish articles by the companies producing the products or authors about their creations.

This type of articles provided the writers as well as the publishers many benefits. For the writers, the article provided excellent free advertising, which otherwise would have cost a lot of money. For the publishers, the articles served as the most authentic original content that their readers wanted to read and hence increased their circulation and revenues.

With the advent of online publishing, e-commerce and Internet marketing, the same practice continued, but with relevant changes to suit the internet. Instead of address and other contact information about the article writer on the print media, on the internet it was served by a bio box and byline that gave a short introduction to the author and a backlink to the author or his website. Some popular authors even shared revenue from content based ads that the article page generated, or even a certain fee for contributing the article.

Rather it can be said, article marketing has transformed itself into an industry on Internet. Separate sites are setup as article sites or an article directory to publish articles where an author can post articles. The directory owner places content based advertising, like Google Ads, on each article page and earns revenue generated by the ads. The article site also gains search engine popularity as more and more articles are posted.

The most notable use of articles is for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). For this purpose articles are written to target niche keywords or key phrases and distributed to content publishers or article directories. Some of the visitors clicking on the links are redirected to the authors’ site and enjoy the benefit of backlinks that are counted for PageRank too. These are particularly beneficial as SEs like Google treat them as organic, naturally created one-way links, as opposed to link exchange that is not considered for PageRank.

When the articles are distributed via RSS, the exposure to the authoring business and number of backlinks is increased greatly. Article marketing has become increasingly popular as a marketing method in Web 2.0 environment. Many sites have gained popularity through viral propagation of articles via social networking sites including video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies such as Facebook, Flickr and others.

From the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) point of view, the backlinks gained through popular sites with good ranking helps much. The higher a page is ranked, the more likely that page will draw a greater number of site visitors. For e-commerce sites, increased traffic means increased sales. Thus article marketing has been effectively used by several leading Internet marketing ventures.

Why should you improve your link popularity?

In any kind of Internet business or activity, you often come across terms like Google PageRank (PR in short), indexed by Google (or indexed by search engines, SERP, Return On Investment (ROI), link popularity, organic links, unique visitors (or quite often the number of visitors irrespective of the number of pages visited by the same visitor), page views (total pages visited, including several pages visited by the same person), etc. These are quite separate concepts, but still interrelated and any one of them or more than one pushes up or pulls down others.

Everything starts with the boringly repeated term, “search engines”. It’s so because it heralds your existence on the internet. It starts from the moment when your link (site or blog URL) is picked up by a search engine. Then, whether you want it or not (unless you restrict SEs using Robots.txt File and meta tags), the search engine indexes your page. It otherwise means if your link is nowhere, you do not exist on the internet.

How many links of you must exist on other sites so that you are indexed and ranked? Even if your link appears in a few other sites, your site will be indexed by search engines, but your listing may appear deep down the list of search results, may be in the millionth page or so, where normally no one will surf down to click on your link!

So, won’t you like your site to appear in the first or second pages of SERPs? Or, for the best results, don't you want to be in the first page itself and on the top of the page? Of course, that’s what you need. No problem, you can be there, if among other things, if your link appears on several pages for your niche keywords or key phrases.

So, how many links should you have to come on top of the search results? Frankly, I have no idea. For that matter, even Google won’t be able to tell you. It is because, whatever may be your industry, you are sure to have many competitors, or similar sites, using the same or more or less similar keywords. If that is the fact, given all other parameters are the same, the site having the most number of links will appear first on the search results.

Now, suppose you are on the first page of the search results and on top of it. Is it an indication that you need not now concentrate on link building to increase rankings? Not exactly! After sometime, you will find that you are again pushed back to a lower position, because your competitors will be continuing to get more of their links placed on other sites and their link popularity will be more than yours.

So, link building is a regular process. It happens when others pick up your links and post somewhere as a reference, or when you do it consciously like listing your site in relevant directories or exchanging links with other sites.

So, in fact link popularity is a measure of the number times your link appears in other sites and how they are picked up by search engines, your pages indexed and ranked by search engines. If you are ranked better, you get more clicks from persons searching for sites like yours. More clicks mean more traffic to your site. More traffic means more ROI or making more money either by sales or advertising or affiliate programs.

Have you ever checked your link popularity? If not you can go to Link Popularity Check Tool and find out your link popularity. You can also check the link popularity of other sites, including sites that ask for link exchange with you. If you have over 10,000 sites linking to you, perhaps you do not like to exchange links with a site that has a link popularity of just 100. Would you? Why? Why not? Let me know your views/ comments.