Art Of Money

Passive Income Tips - Edition #1

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1.) Product of the Week - Ecto
2.) Feature Article - No Shortcuts
3.) Website Spotlight - Site-Reference.com

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Product of the Week
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This week’s product is Ecto http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/

Why it’s recommended:

-> As you write spellchecking
-> Post to multiple blogs from one application
-> Easy image resizing and auto thumbnail creation
-> Page templates

Cost: us$18 21 day free trial available. No affiliate
program.

My take: the Windows version seems a bit unstable,
apparently the Mac version is much better.

Recommended by proBlogger
http://problogger.net/archives/2005/06/21/making-the-most-of-ecto/

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One of the things I’d like to do with this newsletter is to
provide information that I wouldn’t want to put on my site. In
short to get behind the scenes a bit of my business.

Today’s inagural issue seems like a perfect time to begin since
there has been a lot going on behind the scenes of “Jigsaw
Online Media Inc.” .

A recap:

May 1 –> Inspired by having income > expenses from my business
I asked for and received a 4 month leave of absence, to commence
June 1.

May 25 –> MSN changed its algorithm and income from niche sites
declines to be about 70% of expenses!

June 1 –> Start of leave. Nice juicy, reliable government job
paychecks stop for 4 months.

June… –> Despite the fact that we brought new niche sites online
in the last few months, revenues continuing to slide.

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The Best Thing That Ever Happened!
===================================

Cleary this was a decision point. When we were building our niche
sites I knew all along that it was a dangerous path. “All our eggs in

one basket” type of risk.

Not a day when by that I didn’t think: “we have to deversify.”

Now I get to decide, under the financial pressure or knowing that
I may have to go back to work in October, whether to follow
the more subtle whispers that encouraged me to build a high
quality, diversified, sustainable business….or to go back to
building Crack-Sense sites that make good money [used to make
good money] and just find a way to do it better?

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There are No Shortcuts
========================

The question is, what do you want? If what I really want is cash
in my pocket, then the niche sites are the way to go. But what I
really want is a massively profitable, real business.

I’ve realized that I love the business more than the money and
that is what I’m going to stick to.

I’d rather go back to my job and continue to work on building
a real business than to ignore what my real intention was.

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The Shift is Happening
========================

I’ve been working on my first affiliate site all this month
and despite the fact that it hasn’t made me a dime, I’m loving
it a lot.

I’m not putting crap onto the web just to grab a few dollars
from surfers trying to get to something useful.

Focusing on serving the needs of the visitors I write real
content, intended to help them out. And, despite the fact that
it seems like watching paint dry, the time it is taking to get
the site to actually begin to make money [don't forget I'm in
a negative cash flow situation here] my enjoyment level has
skyrocketted.

Now instead of “how can I make more money?” the question in
my mind is “how can I make my site better?”

I know if I just focus on quality everything else will take care
of itself.

==========
Service
==========

When I used to read a keyword phrase from my logs I would think,
“how can I optimize a page to catch more visitors” but now it
has changed to actually realizing that this a real human being
typing in a question and “how can I answer their question?”
is what I ask myself.

I know it’s a cliche but diamonds do really come from coal
under pressure. The pressure for me to continue making low
quality sites, in order to replace my income, was great.

But taking that pressure and not giving in to it, but rather
refocusing it on a new direction, has caused a huge expansion
in my way of working and in the potential for my business.

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To Sum it Up
==============

Income is down.
Business potential and enjoyment level are up.
We’ll see if the money will follow.

Until next week,

Jon Symons

PS. Any feedback or question, just hit reply or visit my site
http://artofmoney.org/contact/ and let it rip, I’d love to
hear from you about anything at all.

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Website Spotlight
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This week’s website in the spotlight is Site-Reference.com
which is vast website full of webmaster resources. The reason
they are this week’s feature site is also a bit of self promotion.

Sometime in the next week they’ll be running an article that
the site manager requested from me. I was given free reign
and the title is, “What Your 7th Grade Teacher Doesn’t Want
You to Know About SEO.” It will be going out in there newsletter
which has 175,000 subscribers so I’m pretty excited to see if
I get a nice traffic kick from it.

I’ll post an update on the fall out, if any in next week’s Passive
Income Tips.
http://www.site-reference.com/