One of my goals with passive marketing has been to diversify my income as much as possible. This is going to involve putting up multiple websites that each generate a small amount ($1000 – $2000) per month in hands-off income. This main site is one of those, and I am hoping to get up about eight more.

Last week I was doing some keyword research when I hit upon a good idea. Everything always sounds like a good idea in beginning, but only time will truly tell. It wasn’t really focused – it was some random terms that I was just really curious about. My main tool for using this was the free Google keyword tool. I won’t tell you the exact phrases, but I can tell you they were local to where I live and they had to do with employment , posting resumes, finding jobs, etc. Using the free Google Keyword tool I was about to find some search terms that are being hit on 200,000 times per month. One of these search terms has pretty low competition. Ahhh. We are hitting the SEO sweet spot. So I hopped on into my domain account over at Enom (which is always pre-funded) and did some checking on domain names. Yes! A trifecta. A domain name with the exact keywords in it was available. because my account is pre-funded I can snatch up domains like that very fast.

I used my hosting reseller account to set up a new hosting account in about 30 seconds. I then put up a basic index.php with the title, description and H1 tags set to good SEO values. it is better to use index.php over index.html or index.htm because you instantly get the advantage of being about to do a little programming on your site. In my case I used a single line of PHP to make the site seem new and relevant. PHP has functions to return the current date and time, and users love to see that the content on the site is new. I always try to use current date/time information on all of my pages.

I created good footer with some other keyword phrases in the same family. And then I filled in the middle with some Javascript that pulls content from another site. The good part about this is that I can get relavant content up there very fast. The bad part about using Javascript is that the content is not really hosted on my site. It is hosted elsewhere. So I am not getting any SEO value from it.

Time invested: Two hours

Money invested: $9.90 (domain purchase only, already had the hosting)

My future goal with this site is to find XML datafeeds of job information that can be monetized. Several of the job sites have affiliate programs. I want to pull those into my database and display local results for my region.

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As I get older and smarter I spend more time thinking about what I am doing. I think about what I am spending my time on at this exact moment. I think about what I did an hour ago and whether or not it was productive. And I am starting obsessive more over what is coming up to try and minimize the amount of time I was on something.

Out of all of these the following realization has hit me:

I cannot do everything

I  have several personal and business projects in motion. This blog about making money, especially passive income, is one of them. I also have my main company site, and my personal branding site. I have my social media accounts that need work on a regular basis. And our business is really growing so the number of client online marketing projects is just skyrocketing. There are only 24 hours in a day and I am falling asleep at they keyboard. My IRL (In real life) relationships are suffering, and I am not doing any flying right now which is breaking my heart.

So in October I made a huge leap and brought on board my very first virtual assistant from odesk.com. I took my time and did my research to find some one who had the skills I needed: WordPress, content management, SEO, and the ability to think on their own and come up with great ideas and implement them.

I am happy to say that this has been an absolutely amazing experience. But it has not been easy. The biggest issue has been trust. I have a huge ego and for the most part I don’t believe that anybody can do it as good as me except for me. And my beliefs are wrong in this area. Given the right instruction anybody can do what I do. So my new challenge in life is documenting what I do every day and how I do it.

Stay tuned. Have you ever used a virtual assistant? What are your biggest challenges?

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As of today we switched themes to the new Latitude theme, a child theme of the Genesis framework. What do you think?

Here is part of your financial planning education. Leave some comments below about what you learned.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtbfbuFkuE8[/youtube]

I’ve posted our very first monthly affiliate income report. Click here to read it and leave a comment.

Screw that default. Here is the real deal.

1. The site is just getting set up and organized. I have to split my time between this and making money in the real world.

2. Goal: Make money online and in the real world. Document how and how much.

3. Will I give exact specifics of my domain names? No. Will I tell you the tools I used. Yes.

4. Do I make money off of links on this website? Yes. Consider yourself disclosed.

I’ll be back.