Which is the entire reason for this blog post. I want to tell you how you can build a residual income stream through blogging that will continue to pay you for years to come.

How to build a residual income stream through blogging

As you may already know, I am a blogger on the Empower Network, which is built around a multi-user wordpress platform. Building a residual income stream through blogging is extremely simple to do with the Empower Network, but without it, things can be a bit more complicated.

You see, Empower Network uses a marketing tactic called a “sales funnel.” A sales funnel is simply a series of web pages which are designed to strike interest and sell a product.

So let’s talk a bit more about blogging and how that relates to this sales funnel.

Blogging is writing. It’s sharing everything you are passionate about, interested in or not interested in, online through a blog. With the tools Empower Network has provided, your content will get found through the search engines. So if you are into dogs, and write a blog post about taking care of your pets, someone searching for the same thing will find your content, click on it, and start reading.

I’m sure you have already noticed the ads on the top and sides of this blog. When those readers come to your blog, a blog provided with the Empower Network basic membership, they’ll also notice those ads. And if they’re looking to make some extra money, they’ll probably click on the ads and enter the sales funnel. From that point on, the funnel does its job and sells the product.

Simple. So, by blogging about the things that interest you, you’ll make sales. And these aren’t just one time sales….these are monthly subscriptions, so you’ll get paid month after month, residually.

How much money are we talking about here?

With the Empower Network, people are making as much as six figures per month and as little as $25 per month. So the sky is the limit. The more content you publish to your blog, the more traffic you’ll receive and the more money you’ll make. Not including the traffic you’ll send to your blog through paid marketing and social promotion.

And here’s the best part…..as you refer new members, you’ll also pass a few of those up to your enroller. It’s part of the compensation plan. Which means that those you enroll will also pass up sales to you. So imagine having enrolled twenty or fifty people who are passing up $25 and $100 commissions to you, being deposited into your bank account on a monthly basis.

You’ll make way more money in passive income than you will ever pass up to your enroller.

I’ve only been in EN for a few months now and have already earned thousands of dollars in passive income, passed up to me from those I’ve enrolled.

Building a residual income stream through blogging with the Empower Network is a ton easier than trying to do it the traditional way. Just take my word for it. I’ve been there and done that. It involves hosting, Adsense, sponsored posts, banner advertisements and affiliate marketing. Not to mention learning, on your own, how to promote your content and get it ranked in the search engines.

Like I said, for $25 a month, the Empower Network takes care of all the stuff you don’t want to have to deal with, so that you can just focus on writing content and making money.

So here’s your chance to see exactly how this sales funnel works. Enter your email address below, or above, for a first hand look!

The cool thing about setting a goal, if you don’t complete your goal, instead of considering yourself a failure, just revise the goal and continue on. My goal was a realistic goal. It’s easy for most people to post one new blog post per day, six days out of the week.

But for me, having four kids and a wife who loves getting out of the house on the weekends, it’s not so easy.

So today my new goal is to blog five days out of the week. I realized that finding the time to post on Saturday was stressing me out. On top of that, I was taking valuable time away from my kids.

So the revision of my goal is to post one blog post five days out of the week. Monday through Friday, you’ll see a fresh, unique and useful post from yours truly.

In addition to relieving some of that stress and allowing me to truly enjoy the weekends with my kids, it will also allow me to bring higher value to you in my content. It’s too tempting to simply throw out some content just to fulfill the goal, especially when you are blogging that much. I know some very successful blogs on the internet that post only once a week. Their content is great and they receive a ton of traffic as well.

So, quantity isn’t always the best blogging tactic. If you can maintain the quantity without sacrificing the quality of your content, then you’re good to go.

This post is not going to tell you how to create that level of income by using Google Adsense. This post will be a little more modest.

How to pay for Christmas with Google Adsense

Now depending on your current lifestyle, the amount of money you’ll need to make it a memorable Christmas for your family is up to you. Some people only purchase one gift for each child while others spoil their kids rotten with a plethora of gifts. And by the way, “plethora” is one of my favorite words. Just so you know.

In my family, depending on what we have going on, we can get by with a modest $1500, but would be able to do much better with around $2500. That buys Christmas for all four of our children, my wife, a single gift for our parents and one for our siblings families. And sometimes that is even too much. Our focus isn’t always on getting gifts, but giving them. Giving makes you feel more fuzzy inside anyway. Right?

Here’s a quick screen shot of my last years earnings from Adsense. It’s not breaking the bank, but it’s paying for Christmas for sure.

So, here’s how to pay for Christmas with Google Adsense, or I should say, how I pay for Christmas with Google Adsense.

1. Start a blog or two in whatever niche or topic that interests you the most. This is a topic that you must be passionate about. You’ll need to be able to share a lot of information about this certain topic. IMPORTANT: Do not start a blog on blogger or wordpress.com. Start a self hosted wordpress blog.
2. Blog daily, if possible. Post to your blog as often as you possibly can with quality content that offers value to those who will read it. It can take anywhere between thirty minutes to an hour to write a 300 to 600 word blog post.
3. Place Adsense ads in the “hot spots” of your website. And if you’re like me when I first got started with Adsense, I wasn’t quite sure where the hotspots were. Just think of how we read as English speakers….from left to right, top to bottom. Right? So naturally, place your ads starting on the top left of your site, somewhere on the top/middle right of your content and one right after your content. Those have been the positions that have worked the best for me.
4. Share your content on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Place links to your blog posts in groups, create a Facebook page for your site and promote your content as best you know how. And then encourage discussion. If your content is good, people will share it naturally.

If you do the math, an hour a day, five days a week, fifty two weeks a year equals 260 hours. Divide that by $2500, and your hourly rate is around $10/hour. However, to make $2300, I put in maybe two hours a week. The math on that comes out to around $23/hour. And most of that comes from just one of our blogs, as you see that I don’t have Adsense installed on this blog. If you’re curious why, fill out the form at the top of the site and you’ll understand. If I had put more effort into blogging, that number would have increased drastically.

So if you’re a stay at home Mom, Dad, or would just like to make money with the extra time you have, Adsense is a great way to do that. And as you can see, my “how to pay for Christmas with Google Adsense” tutorial isn’t all that technical. That’s because it really isn’t technical. The most difficult part is being extremely consistent at blogging, and that in itself isn’t really that difficult at all. It’s just a commitment.

Helpful Tips:

If you don’t know how to setup a self hosted wordpress blog, Click Here to have someone design one for you and then teach you how to use it.

If you want to wait until November to receive your Adsense check or payment, be sure to put your payments on hold from within your Adsense dashboard. You’ll find it on the left under “Payments/Payment Settings.” Just click on “configure” to the right of your monthly threshold. You can set an exact date.

Never underestimate the potential an image has in bringing high quality traffic to your site. If it’s optimized correctly, at times, you’ll be found more for your images than you will for your actual content. At least this stands true for several of my posts.

However, in order to get more traffic with your images, there are a few things you’ll need to do.

First, your image must be a higher quality image. There’s nothing that annoys me more than an image that has been stretched to fit a specific space. Stretching an image distorts and blurs it, making it look very cheap and unappealing. If you’re using wordpress as your CMS, I would typically upload an image that is at least 600 pixels wide and 400 tall, or vice versa. WordPress has features that can reduce the size of your image if need be. It’s always better to start big and downsize.

NEVER stretch an image. EVER. Please….for my sanity.

Second, all images must have an ALT tag. In order to get more traffic with images through Google searches, Google has to know what your image is about. Your ALT tag will tell their spiders that information. However, be sure to match your image to the ALT text you assign to it. As an example, you don’t want to give a picture of a cat the ALT tag of “dog.” With that in mind, your ALT tag will also give you SEO credit. Google counts your properly tagged image as a bonus point. In WordPress, when editing or adding an image to your post, the space that reads “alternate text” is the ALT tag.

If you aren’t using wordpress, the basic HTML for an ALT tag is simple:

<img src=”http://www.yourdomainname.com/images/makemoneyfromhome.jpg”alt=”Make Money from Home” />

Third, send a message with your image. Get an image editing program installed on your computer. I use Macromedia Fireworks for all my photo editing and graphic design. Starting out, a few things you can learn that greatly increases the look of an images are: adding simple borders, adding text and cropping correctly. Once you learn the basics, you can start venturing off into more advanced image and graphic design.

For example, if you’re currently working a home based business, you could include a call to action on your images, or even just the title of your post. Try your best to describe, or represent the content of your blog post with your image.

Lastly, include a watermark, logo or website URL on your image. Know that one of the reasons your images are being found is because other bloggers and internet marketers are looking for an image to use in their own content. Adding a logo and your website URL to the image will make sure that they know who created the image and where to find the original. That won’t stop some people from cutting those things out of the image, but it will sure help with bringing more people to your blog when they don’t.

In conclusion, adding the right images to your blog posts will not only increase your traffic, it will also increase the quality of your site and the amount of time your visitors spend on your site. Most people are the type that just flip through the magazine, looking at all the pictures, and when they find one that interests them, they’ll stop and read. The same applies to your blog. Without images, many of your visitors will leave your site within seconds of arriving. Not good.

A quality image can go extremely viral and is shown across the web in areas such as Facebook posts, on Pinterest, Flickr and in RSS feeds.

It only takes a few more minutes to add an image. Take the time to do it. I promise you it will be worth it!

But as you might already know, I committed myself to post one new blog post daily, and I can’t go back on that commitment. So on those days where the creative juices are a little dammed up, I find myself procrastinating, hoping for some inspiration to start flowing.

Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, I become a late night blogger that has to proof read my post several times because of all the misspellings. And who wants to spend their evenings writing a blog post anyway?

It can be difficult to blog daily, but I’ve come to realize something….as long as I write something, and use proper SEO tactics on my blog post, someone is going to read it. Someone on this planet is going through the same thing, so it will get found in the search engines, and as a result, my site will get more traffic. And for a home based business guy, more traffic equals more leads, and more leads equals more income. More income allows me to live a lifestyle unique to less than three percent of this world!

So what am I fretting about? I have plenty of information in my head that someone on this planet will relate to, and so do you. So when you find yourself fresh out of ideas, blog about that. Start putting in writing the thoughts in your head at that very moment, and then publish that.

I guarantee you’ll feel better after you do and that you’ll get traffic because of it. Remember, it’s your blog. Write what you want, not what others expect you to.