What are you going to be doing over the next year or two that has a significant impact on your life?

Would you like to build a business, one that helps you to buy your freedom, such that you no longer have to work at a regular job?

What if you could work on such a business in your spare time, and that business was paying you $1,000/month at the end of two years?

What if you quit your day job, put only 20 hours each week into your business, and then grew it to $2,000/month in income?

What would your life be like if you could earn several thousand dollars per month with only an investment of an hour or two each day?

I can tell you what your life would be like, because I have achieved the legendary four hour work week.

Life is awesome when you own a lean online business. It is almost like being on a permanent vacation, where you only work on something when it gets you excited to do so.

That may sound like a completely impossible fantasy, but it is actually not that complicated to achieve.

While the plan to build passive income is relatively simple, that does not mean it is easy to execute. There is a difference. However, let me show you just how simple it can be to achieve the four hour week and thus buy your freedom back from society.

A simple business plan

Create a single website. Just one.

Oh, I know…. conventional wisdom dictates that everyone needs to diversify, lest they risk losing their online income that they have worked so hard to achieve.

Let me tell you a secret though: Building authority and link juice for a website is tough.

It’s so tough, in fact, that I strongly urge you to only try to do it once. You’ll understand why when we look at the promotional strategy.

I would also urge you to choose a topic for your website in which:

* You have at least some working knowledge or expertise.
* The products or services being advertised around your topic cost over $100.

In other words, choose a profitable topic for your website that you can write about with real authority.

You can determine profitability by looking at existing websites based on your topic. What are they advertising? How much does it cost? If the cost is very low, move on and find another topic.

If you have a team of writers working for you, by all means, start several websites. But if you are going to be the only one publishing content on your website, I would urge you to just start a single site and put all of your energy into it.

A simple content strategy

Create articles for your website that are:

* Detailed, in-depth, and insightful.
* Original, with a depth of knowledge that goes beyond what is already available on the web.
* Useful to the audience in a specific way. Consider including action items that the reader can implement directly.

Thoroughly research the internet regarding your content and identify the absolute best information currently available. Your job is to create a website that is superior to what you find.

Each article you publish should explore slightly different ideas and concepts regarding your topic. Each article should target unique long tail keyword phrases in the post title.

Quality of content must remain extremely high. That said, volume matters as well, and publishing three articles daily is ideal.

Balancing volume and quality is tough. Publishing one quality article per day will result in slow growth. Publishing three per day will result in exciting growth within a year or two.

A simple promotional strategy

Build relationships with other website owners in your niche, with the goal of landing a guest post some day.

That’s it. That is the entire promotional strategy. Very difficult to do in high volume, but take your time and keep plugging away at it. Websites need time to age anyway.

There are dozens of ways to manufacture cheap links and give your website a quick boost in the search engines. All of these “cheap” methods are losing their effectiveness over time because the search engines are always improving at measuring real trust and authority.

The simple way to promote your website is to build real trust and authority. You can do that by building real relationships and creating amazing content.

Your promotional strategy hinges on having premium content. No one wants to link to a poor quality website. No one wants to publish a guest post that is anything less than premium quality. Therefore, an important part of your promotional effort is to focus on creating amazing content–both on and off-site.

Simple but not easy

I built a profitable website and sold it for six figures by:

* Building a single website in a profitable niche.
* Publishing lots of quality content–around 1,500 articles total.
* Promoted the site with real relationship building and guest posting.

Looking back, it was dead simple. I published helpful articles every day and did a bit of promotional work. The promotional work was probably only five percent of the effort, while creating the website itself was ninety five percent.

Anyone can do this with almost zero overhead and only a consistent time investment on their part. The question is, who will do it, given that it is so difficult?

What about you? Are you motivated to purchase your freedom by building a simple internet business?

* Have a good SEO campaign

People need to be able to find you online so that they can go to your website, so pretty much all marketing campaigns these days use a search engine optimization program where they pay money for third-party companies to place links on websites.

One of the first mistakes many inexperienced marketers make when marketing a product that will benefit from SEO is that they try to go as cheap as possible. All link building companies are the same, they think. They do a Google search for SEO companies and find one in India that will give you a backlink for fifteen bucks. All goes well for a few months. Then, their site suddenly disappears from Google. After a few days of research, they find out that they’ve been blacklisted from Google and removed from the search index.

* You get what you pay for

Something that sounds too good to be true usually is. If you hire an outsourced company with writers who barely speak English, they’re only going to be able to get backlinks onto spam blogs. Google is pretty good at figuring out which blogs are spam blogs. Usually there are a few networks of blogs that trade backlinks with other spam blog networks, creating what is called a mutual admiration society.

On the other hand, SEO companies with native English-speaking writers get links on websites with actual human readers, and write articles that appear more genuine to robotic crawlers. If you find a really good company, they could even write posts with content geared toward lead generation, so you get more leads from the SEO produced by the links in the posts as well as from the posts themselves.

* Use site acceleration

Most potential leads are lost within eight seconds of clicking on a link, so you have at most eight seconds to convince somebody that your landing page is worth reading. Even if they’ve already bit the hook in your meta description and your header, they’ll still click back or go to a different site the vast majority of the time.

What this means is that people get impatient quickly when your site doesn’t load. This was less of a problem in the 56k era when people were used to waiting for a site to load, but now people are less tolerant since they don’t have to wait for sites to load very often. Tablets present another problem since people can just swipe back and don’t even have to move their cursor to their browser’s up arrow anymore. Plus, even if people do wait, they will be frustrated with having to wait for so long, so they are less tolerant of a landing page that doesn’t immediately catch their interest.

Guest post author details:

David Henzel is VP of Marketing and a partner at NetDNA, which provides CDN solutions that deliver fast page load times for enterprise and SMB websites. A serial entrepreneur, David has more than 11 years of experience in online marketing, having launched and sold several online businesses in Germany before coming to NetDNA in 2009.

If you walk into a physical insurance office located down the corner from your house or in your town or city’s main business district (some insurance offices in rural areas are located on rural roads) then you will not have many options. Usually the office will be run by one company or it will be run through a broker who will not necessarily give you a good rate or have very many plans available for you to pick from. With all insurance you will have to get a credit report first, but a lot of physical offices do not have plans for people with bad credit.

However, there are still ways you can make money online and use the money to buy insurance even with bad credit:

* Become a paid SEO blogger

Blogging isn’t easy but it’s not too complicated either, and a lot of companies will pay pretty good money for people to write articles for them and get them published online. They do this primarily because the articles have backlinks to the company’s site, which helps the company show up high on search engine results and gives them targeted traffic. And since so many people use search engines today for almost all of their business research needs but ignore the ads on the top (I bet even more so lately since Google recently has been putting so many ads at the top that over half the page space is ads on small screens and mobile devices). This means that it is really valuable for companies to show up high on Google’s organic results because more people will click on those than will click on the Adwords ads that are shaded a different color.

* Start your own blogging company

The real way to make money in almost any field is to build connections and start your own company. This is especially true in the search engine optimization (SEO) world where companies will pay a premium for good SEO work. If you hire other people who are good writers, those writers benefit because they may not have the connections themselves to make money. You benefit because you profit from their work. Even if you only profit $20/hour/worker, if you hire 20 employees then you make $400/hour, and that’s excluding work you do on your own with your own two hands.

* Get paid to write PR articles

You can get paid to post articles for public relations purposes. These articles will be read by actual humans and, while still containing links to your product, will not be there for the primary purpose of bumping you up on Google. Instead, the articles will be read by actual people who will be interested in them and you will make money this way.

* Build an Adsense website/blog

Google Adsense provides an easy way for marketing people who want to make money online. What you need to do is first create a niche site. These sites should be geared toward something that is commonly advertised online, such as health, fitness, and financial services products like Forex. Then, you need to write articles that should be at least 500 words for these websites and write lots of them.

Make sure the article is good for ads:

In order to make money off Google Adsense, your site needs to produce ads that are relevant to things people search for. There are complex professional ways that you can figure out what keywords work, but the basic ways involve using the Google Adsense keyword tool and also using common sense. For example, consider two articles: One about “making money blogging” and one about “monetizing your blog.” The one about monetization will draw professional bloggers because they use the word “monetize” while the one about making money will draw people who do not yet blog but are looking to get into blogging.

How to write the articles:

The articles should use keywords for terms for which people have bought a lot of ads and one term should be in the title. That term should also be used in the first paragraph, especially the first 200 words, one or two times (it’s okay to break up the term as long as the words are close to each other). The keywords need to be for terms for which there are ads, so make sure to do a Google search and see that there are at least 10 or so ads for the term you’re using a lot in your article.

Those are some great ways you can use the internet to make money blogging and writing. It’s not rocket science but it’s not super easy either. You will need to do a lot of writing every day and be creative. If you can do that then you can definitely earn money online!

This is a guest post written by Murray Newlands, the CEO and Founder of Influence People.

I’ve been in online marketing for years and I can share two great ways that you can make money off of your blog:

1) INTENTclick: Monetizing your text

Companies like INTENTclick, Kontera, and Viglinks work in a pretty unique way: They create advertising links on text that is on your blog. When somebody’s mouse goes over one of these links, a pop-up shows up which they can then click on.

Some of the older in-text monetization companies like Infolinks only pay you for each click, but the more modern ones like INTENTclick pay you a higher rate if you have a higher conversion rate. This is great for publishers (like bloggers) because it means that they get more money, and it’s great for people trying to sell products and services online because it incentives bloggers to produce high-quality content that is aimed at people who are likely to convert farther down the sales cycle.

2) Publish an eBook

Once you have a large amount of readers on your blog (or even if you do not if you do good SEO work), you can publish an eBook, which has two main ways of making money:

* Give the eBook away for free – The most common way to make money off eBooks is to give it away for free. You ask people to provide their email address and provide other information, and inform them that they will receive information about offers, or you can have them sign up for your newsletter as a requisite for downloading your eBook. Most people do not like it if you sell their data to other companies (that’s how you would make money if you go the “special offers” route) so make sure you clearly inform them if you do that. If you send them a weekly newsletter then you can put ads in the letter but keep your trusted readers’ information private.

* Sell the eBook – Selling the eBook can work really well if you have established yourself as a trust agent and if you have an audience that is wealthy enough to buy it. Pricing can be tricky but you need to keep in mind how much money you would be making per person (on average, though there can be high variance) if you had given your book out for free. Remember that people usually use PayPal and they can take a hefty rake!

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands of Influence People. His company does blogger relations work for a variety of clients, including INTENTclick.

Simply translating what already works, usually from English, rarely achieves the best results. The terms people use to search vary from language to language (naturally), as well as from culture to culture. Investing time in researching and understanding your new customers’ keyword preferences and their culture will maximize your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) and ensure it is attracting traffic.

So How Do Keywords Work?
Keywords match the content in a website with the terms or phrases being used in search engines. As people search for a particular product or service, the websites best matching the ‘search criteria’ are listed, with the most relevant (and best optimized) appearing first.

Naturally, every website wants to be at the top of that search list (search engine results page, or SERP) and getting there requires a combination of different SEO strategies. Working the right keywords into a website’s copy is the cheapest and most effective way to increase online presence, and it applies to all websites in all languages.

Choosing The ‘Right’ Keywords
The process of identifying the ‘right’ keywords for a website can seem counter-intuitive. Rather than using technical product terminology, people tend to search the web in more day-to-day terms.

Online tools, such as Google AdWords, are great for identifying key search terms. A search for specialist tea, for example, brings up 1,300 hits; however, a search for fancy tea brings up 6,600. Where Google AdWords excels is in pointing out that special tea – not a million miles away from the first search – produces over 18,000 searches. Making the tiniest of tweaks to a website’s copy can have an impressive impact on a website’s SEO.

Google AdWords is also great for identifying market competition. Despite being almost three times as popular in searches, special tea has less than half the amount of competition that fancy tea does; so which phrase would a tea vendor best use on their website? And the principle can apply to any sector or topic; knowing how consumers search is just as important as giving them the content they want when they get to your website.

Multilingual Keywords
Exactly the same principles apply when creating a website in another language. Working with a professional localization and internet marketing agency is worth every cent and highly recommended. Simply translating a crib-sheet of English keywords is not enough, and foreign language internet marketing agencies provide the vital cultural insight and the language skills needed to guarantee optimization across all your target languages.

Key phrases can even vary between countries sharing a common language. For example, in Spain, coche is commonly used for car, whereas in Latin America, it is used for a baby-stroller. Losing potential business for such a simple mistake can be a major optimization problem.

Current and Creative Content
Keeping your website content creative and up-to-date is a given for any successful website. Blogs and news sections are great avenues to keep the website current, as well as to boost its SEO. Keep abreast of issues both internationally and locally (in the target cultures), and work the relevant keywords into topical articles; their currency helps the website’s search engine rank position and the keywords help to attract interested consumers.

Other Important Keyword Rules
Once the ‘right’ keywords have been identified, they should be incorporated throughout the website. Google prefers a keyword density of around two to four percent, so apply the power of one to your keywords; once in the title, once in the description, and once or twice within the article…and in the URL as well. But as with everything, less is more – you should aim to optimize each web page for no more than two keywords. Articles that read like a hit-list of keywords are not only boring for readers, but can be flagged-up by search engines as spam.

Honing the content of your website through a few simple language choices can truly maximize its search engine performance, and the effects can be seen surprisingly quickly!

About the author:

Christian Arno is the founder of Lingo24, one of the world’s fastest growing providers of translation services. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 150 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over forty million words for businesses in every industry sector, including the likes of MTV, World Bank and American Express. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter: @Lingo24