I Just Need Twelve Years and Ten Dollars

I had the opportunity to play golf yesterday afternoon for the first time this month.  Take a busy June and mix in plenty of rain and there is little time for golf.  But the schedule was light at work, and I was able to get out at 2:30 to meet a friend at the golf course and play 18 holes starting about 3:30.  We got the twilight rate for $20 which included green fees and a cart.  We managed to only get sprinkled on for one hole and finished before the rain came in full force.

I had such a good time that it got me to thinking of retirement.  If I could get all my debts paid off including mortgages over the next 12 years, then I could use the income from the rental properties to pay for living expenses.  Then if I could just get $10 per day from my blogs and other online sources, I could golf 3 afternoons per week at the twilight rate.  The youngest child would be 23 years old and out of the house so I would have plenty of time on my hands and could even have lots of time to do other things like travel. 

Now, I just have to come up with a workable plan on the debt since I figure I can get to $10 per day in the next decade fairly easily.

My Newest Site

You can now check out my newest site, Cash Flow Mantra, by clicking on the feed on the right.  I figured that I might as well share it for several reasons.  First, the majority of my referral traffic for OptionsDude comes from this blog so I would gain a likely source of traffic for the new one.  Second, it isn't some super lucrative niche that is easy to monetize so I am not all that worried about anyone stealing my ideas.  My ideas aren't all that brilliant anyway.  If someone thinks that my stuff which will be lucky to get $1 per month is worth stealing, go for it.  Third, I am sure that someone here might have some good comments or suggestions on the new blog so feel free to visit and comment.

Currently, you can get to most of my online ventures through this blog.  It is like the central hub for everything and allows you to see feeds from HubPages, OptionsDude, and Cash Flow Mantra.  I do have a few other content sites that have a little bit of material on them, but they earn nothing.  These three will be the main sources of income for this year.  I would like to develop another blog possibly geared toward sales and Amazon affiliate income.  I have an idea but I wouldn't even start that until after a few more months if I do it.

I am pleased with the progress that I am making with Cash Flow Mantra.  I have been working my fingers off commenting on personal finance blogs and gathering an audience.  It does seem to be working.  I bet by the end of the month, I will have as much traffic as at OptionsDude.  If I get any boost of traffic from this site, then I know I will have more.  It is probably because the site has a more broad topic than simply options.  Options are a fairly specific investment topic with a limited audience.

Feel free to stop by my newest site, read a few posts, comment on them, or come back here and let me know what you think.  As always, thanks for reading.  I appreciate it immensely.

Carpet Bombing Your Niche Keywords

If you have any knowledge of military history, you will understand that carpet bombing refers to the practice of just dropping tons and tons of bombs onto an area without any real concern for aiming at a specific target. Instead, complete destruction of the area is the desired result.

This should be the goal of any successful internet writer when it comes to his/her target niche--namely, complete and utter coverage. I can provide a small personal example of this as it relates to my SEO Experiment.

For those who have followed this blog for a while now, you may remember that in October 2009, I sought to target the keyword phrase, "SEO Experiment." I had been reading about search engine optimization and was just learning what backlinks were and finally gaining an understanding of the process of ranking in the search engine results.

I decided to write a blog post with the title, "SEO Experiment" and see if I could rank for that phrase by creating various links using related articles on various self-publishing sites like HubPages, InfoBarrel, Xomba, etc. By using these techniques, I was even able to get to Google page 1!

But the best part is that even though I haven't done any work on the post since November, I am still showing up at position number 16. Furthermore, there are lots of related articles that show up in the top 100 search results in Google. For example,

1. Why Am I Doing An SEO Experiment? on HubPages at position 21
2. 5 Things I Learned From My SEO Experiment on Xomba at position 35
3. Update on the SEO Experiment from this blog at position 51 as well as a link to this update on BlogEngage at position number 95.

Granted that may not sound all that great, but I am sure that a little bit of effort could improve those rankings.

To me, that is encouraging and suggests that if you have a decent paying niche without a lot of competition, it would be relatively easy to carpet bomb the internet with articles and dominate the search results for that particular topic over time.

The trick comes in identifying a relatively uncompetitive niche that will still pay well. Of course, I guess that is what separates the professionals from the rest of us. My goal over the next several months will be to identify a few niches in which I can compete and see what happens. If nothing else, I will have developed additional content along the way.

Thanks for reading! I hope that this example has been helpful. I know that I learned a lot by undergoing the process.