Passive Income Journal

Form Your Company

KC Greene — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 21:30:45 +0000

I did a Google search on how to form an LLC in my State. My state allows you to register for your LLC on-line. I found that it was a relatively easy process. Part of my passive income plan includes affiliate marketing so I needed to get my EIN (Employer Identification Number). It took me some searching through the state website but finally found how I could get that online as well. Most affiliate programs require that you give them either your social security number or you businesses EIN number. If you plan on making any kind of real income on the internet using affiliate programs I highly recommend forming an LLC and NOT using your social security number. If filing for your LLC in your state is not as easy as it was in mine there are services like LegalZoom.com. I have not used this service but I have heard of others who have and it seem to work well.

Depending on what type of business you will be starting and many other factors, it can be daunting to figure out what type of business to form. There are LLC’s and Partnerships and full Corporations. If you are unsure than meet with an attorney or do your homework about the benifits and drawbacks of each.

WordPress Plugin

KC Greene — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 05:43:50 +0000

The particular site that I wanted to create needed to have advanced rating and ranking abilities. At first I thought I was going to have to hire a web programmer to get it to do what I want. However, after a little searching I found a WordPress plugin that enabled my site to do what I wanted. It’s not perfect… but it works pretty good. I paid $85 for the plugin and I think that is a great deal. This at least allows me to test the site. If the site bombs at least I’m not out thousands of dollars in web programmer fees.

WordPress Themes

KC Greene — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 06:16:13 +0000

I searched the Internet for days looking for a WordPress theme that I liked. I tried several but could not find one that I really liked and would look professional. I wanted my site to show that there was a human behind it but I also don’t want it to be completely amateur looking. One of the guys from Internet Business Mastery, Jason VanOrden has a website jasonvanorden.com. I like how clean his site was and found that he was using a theme called Fresh News. So I bought that theme as well for $70 I think. I even got an extra theme for free! The theme came from Woo Themes. They have some good ones. My recommendation if you are going to buy a theme from Woo Themes is to wait till they have one of their sales that get four themes for the price of one. I think they offer this once or twice per year. Obviously if you can’t wait you must to what needs to be done.

Please note that there are lots of free themes out there that you can use for your WordPress site. Most are pretty cookie cutter but there are some really good free ones also. It may take some time but you might be able to find one that suits you without spending any money here.

Web Hosting

KC Greene — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 05:58:16 +0000

As I mentioned before, the next thing I did was signed up for a hosting service to host my website. I used the hosting service suggested by the Internet Business Mastery guys. Again, if you become a member they take you through step by step on how to get it all set up. After watching their video it was pretty easy to figure out. The hosting service was running a special so it cost me about $55 for the entire year. I think that is pretty reasonable.

Now that I have set up a site on my own host and also have this site hosted by wordpress.com I can see some major differences.

For one, you can not add new widgets or plugins to your wordpress.com site. At least not that I’ve been able to figure out. You have lots of widgets to choose from so that helps but there are definately some that I am using on my hosted site that I would like to have on this one. The plugins would be nice as well. For instance, at smallbusinessthings.com I installed a plugin so readers can send my posts to their twitter feed.

Another thing that you can not do on a wordpress.com site is use Google Adsense. What a bummer.

Eventually I will probably move this site to a hosted solution but it is fine for now.

Building A Website

KC Greene — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:14:42 +0000

When you go through the academy like I did you skip a few steps. I went almost strait to the section on how to create a website.

I had created some websites on SquareSpace.com and weebly.com. SquareSpace costs money but the look is more professional. Weebly is free unless you need some added features and space.

You would need to spend $35 per month with squarespace to get most of the features you are going to need for a site that is going to be able to generate passive income probably.

I like weebly for how totally simple it is. I recently built a site for a good friend of ours who owns a dance studio. She had no website so I bought the web address for $7.49 for the year at GoDaddy and built the site free on weebly. When I was done I gave our friend the username and password to the site and now she goes in and updates it. If you have basic computer skills you can create a site on weebly.

I personally took the advice of the guys on Internet Business Mastery and went with a WordPress site. This site is self hosted which means that I am paying a hosting company. I used the one they suggest in the academy and it’s nice because they show you exactly how to set up the site with the hosting service. The main reason I wanted to go with WordPress is because it is so popular. You can find so many themes (some free some paid for) and also tons of widgets and plugins.

Now this site that I am writing the Journal on right now is a WordPress blog hosted by WordPress.com. It’s free and the search engines love it!

Find Your Mentors

KC Greene — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:35:16 +0000

Second I signed up for the Internet Business Mastery Academy. I have been listening to these guys podcast for over two years. It’s always great information but I needed more step by step how-to from the beginning. It’s $97 per month for the membership and at the time of this writing they have 11 courses in the academy. I love the courses because most of it it audio courses. I have very limited time and it is nice to be able to listen in my car and while doing chores around the house. They also have videos that show you how to do many of the things that they talk about. I’ve been in the academy for about two months now and I have learned a lot. I wish I had more time to spend inside. They have a forums area where the members can help each other out. I have spent some time reading and even contributing but not as much as I would like. Hopefully, when I get the site running smoothly I will be able to spend more time on this. I think it would be very valuable. I only have about an hour each day to spend working on my business at this point so it has been slow.

Web Site Registration

KC Greene — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:16:50 +0000

First, as I mentioned before, I registered the website address with www.GoDaddy.com
. I always use GoDaddy.com to register my sites. I am not sure if they are the best or the cheapest but I have never had any problems with them. I think it’s a good idea to register all of your domains at the same place for simplicity sake. They have my PayPal information on file so I can register domains quickly and without having to dig out my credit card each time. One of the other reasons I like GoDaddy.com is because they are one of the largest companies. You can feel pretty safe knowing the company is probably not going to be out of business anytime soon. Also, when you have website addresses, sometimes they need to have settings adjusted. I’ve always found that other services usually always include instructions on how to change settings using GoDaddy. If you use a different, less popular, service and you’re a novice like me, you probably have to figure it out for yourself.

Back Story

KC Greene — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 07:42:44 +0000

OK so here is my first post on site. If you’ve read the about page on this site then hopefully you get what this is all about. If you haven’t then go read that page first.

I need to go into what I have done up to this point and then I will I will have regular updates from this point on.

So I have had several business ideas over the past several years. I’ve started websites for a few of them but for one reason or another they fizzles out. You should always start a business around something that you are passionate about. My passion is small business marketing so of course I want to start a business around that. The problem is that I can’t start a local small business marketing business because it would be a conflict of interest with my day job. On the other hand, a small business marketing business on-line is difficult because it is hard to help a business effectively with their marketing over the internet. You need to experience the business first hand most of the time. I needed to come up with an idea where I could help small businesses online, make a passive income doing it, and not have that conflict of interest issue.

A couple of months ago I came up with a new idea for a website. I was excited about it but just to make sure I wasn’t getting excited over nothing, I explained my idea to a few of my friends. These are friends that would not just tell me they liked the idea if they really didn’t. In fact one was not very impressed with the website address I finally decided to go with. (This little detail in itself took several weeks and I think I registered 3 other addresses before I finally decided on the final one.) Anyhow, all of the people I bounced the idea off of thought that it was good so I decided to peruse it.