In case you are not financially independent yet, you may want to start with the first step and follow the journey to financial freedom:

1. Freedom Starts in the Mind
2. 5 Reasons to Follow Your Passion Instead of Money
3. How to Make Money Online and Enjoy Freedom
4. Ken Evoy and Site Build It
5. How to Write Content That Attracts Visitors And Natural Links
6. On-page Search Engine Optimization
7. Make Your Site Known – Link-Building Strategies
8. Intelligently Monetize Your Website
9. Test and Tweak To Maximize Your Website Income

Ensure Financial Independence In The Long Term

You’ve reached the end of one the most exciting and important milestones of your life. You are financially independent!

This means you are earning enough money from your home-based online business to can easily afford all the expenses of a normal life with, hopefully, some extra money to afford a great vacation, a new LCD TV, or even a more comfortable and safer car.

Your goal now is is to balance the freedom that your e-business success provides you with while still growing your online assets to ensure financial independence in the long term.

While it’s highly unlikely that the whole Internet will crash one day, it is possible that your site could be delisted or penalized by accident, even if you never break any of Google’s webmaster guidelines.

This is why you need to diversify your income streams. In case one income dries up for any reason, you’ll have others to back it up.

You can diversify your income streams in 3 ways:

a) Diversify the topics of your websites

You don’t want to make 7 travel websites that all depend on the same topic. Although people will always want to travel and the demand will grow in the future, your online empire will always rely on the same type of business.

The recent US mortgage crisis revealed that even massive and profitable markets like mortgages and housing loans are not always stable.

Your goal, then, should be to create different types of websites, like product reviews, travel, home related (improvement, cleaning, decorating, …), pet related (always in huge demand), and so on.

By doing this, your income will come from different types of visitors. It is highly unlikely that they would all be affected by the swings in the global economy.

b) Diversify your monetization strategies

Diverse monetization types will follow automatically if you follow the first step of creating different websites.

Even if your websites are all product review related, you can still monetize them with Google Adsense, Chitika, Amazon, Shopping, eBay and other types of affiliate links.

Online spending grows year after year, so you should never worry about a lack of demand.

It is still possible to be banned from Google Adsense, though, so if your whole online business model is based on Adsense, you run the risk of having a financial and mental breakdown, should your Adsense income suddenly disappear.

Your best bet is to sell your own digital products, create website earnings from contextual advertising networks like Adsense and Chitika, and build websites that focus on lead generation and affiliate marketing.

If you really want to be financially independent and free from worries about the future, imagine losing 50% of your income tomorrow and then determine whether you would still be able to enjoy financial freedom based on your online business.

c) Combine Online and Offline Businesses Based on Passive Income

Even though offline businesses typically create a lot of work, such as manufacturing, shipping products and customer support, there are ways to build offline businesses based on passive income.

One example is a small internet room where you rent internet connections for a fee based on the time spent online.

You only need to hire someone to collect the cash and make sure everything runs smoothly.

The key to success with this idea, of course, is demand and choosing a great location. While in the online world everything revolves around information, in the offline world the key to success is location.

Serve the Humanity With Your Talents

Let’s say you’ve done all of the above and you now enjoy a constant stream of passive income with almost no work from your side.

Now what?

This is one of the most complex life questions faced by everyone who is financially independent.

Some of the wrong choices one can make after becoming financially free are:

• Wasting money on luxury cars, houses and clothes
• Wasting your life doing nothing that serves other people (being selfish)
• Just wanting more and more money
• Using money to gain power over other people

In my opinion, the purpose of life is to enjoy the ride while it lasts, learn life lessons that create better a character, and serve other people with the talents and skills you have developed in your journey so far.

I also think that money is only one third of what makes us happy.

Once the money problem is taken care of, you need to balance the egoistic desire to please yourself (which will always exist) with your purpose of serving and helping other people with your talents.

Your goal after becoming financially independent should be to help solve challenges that other people face.

You can help by:

• Creating digital or physical products (beginning tennis videos, how to make money online ebooks, writing how-to books…)
• Offering personal coaching and guidance
• Organizing and / or attending seminars on your topic
• Writing and submitting articles for online and offline publications

How I did it (and what I plan for the future)

I have, at present, two main income streams that earn me almost $10,000 per month. I sell ebooks and videos on my passion website, TennisMindGame.com, and I have created a few product review based websites that earn money through Adsense, Chitika and affiliate programs.

My goal is to create at least 5 to 10 large content websites that will depend on free search engine traffic and convert it into sales and clicks on PPC ads.

I’m already working on a new set of tennis videos for advanced players and plan to create 3 DVD’s on tennis tactics next year, in collaboration with another tennis coach and good friend.

Since tennis is my area of expertise, I will very likely stay in this field and focus more on the mental side of the game, where I have good skills and talents, to help other tennis players overcome their mental barriers.

Another topic about which I feel passionate is financial freedom and independence.

I plan to share my ideas on this blog and, eventually, may do some coaching or even create an ebook or a training program to help others.

Another topic that I need to look into is the stock market. I plan, at the least, to start investing in mutual funds.

Thank you for reading this »10 Steps to Freedom« series.

I am 100% confident that you can achieve financial independence by following the steps I have outlined here.

Let me conclude this journey to freedom with my favorite freedom quotes:

“Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” Benjamin Franklin

“Freedom lies in being bold.” Robert Frost

“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.” Albert Camus

“Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.” Albert Einstein

The more freedom we enjoy, the greater the responsibility we bear, toward others as well as ourselves. Oscar Arias Sanchez

“Freedom is the opportunity to make decisions…”

The eight steps covered before are:

1. Freedom Starts in the Mind
2. 5 Reasons to Follow Your Passion Instead of Money
3. How to Make Money Online and Enjoy Freedom
4. Ken Evoy and Site Build It
5. How to Write Content That Attracts Visitors And Natural Links
6. On-page Search Engine Optimization
7. Make Your Site Known – Link-Building Strategies
8. Intelligently Monetize Your Website

Maximizing Your Adsense and Chitika revenue

The basic idea of setting up different types of channels that work with Google Adsense and Chitika will work with any type of contextual advertising or even affiliate marketing you choose to add to your site.

The two main ways of setting up channels and how to profit from them are:

1. Set Up Channels For Placement

When you plan to monetize your website with contextual ads, it’s best to start with the proven and tested placements that you already learned about in Step 8 – How to Monetize Your Website Intelligently.

This means placing the ads above the fold in the top left corner of your content pages.

Secondary ads that can also work well are 160 x 600 ad blocks placed under the menu or in the third column.

The key here is that, although you will place ads on many pages, your goal is not to track how each page performs, but how each placement performs.

Since every website has a different design with a different topic, you’ll need to run repeated tests to determine which ad placements perform best.

The easiest way to do this is prepare your pages in advance with “Includes” files. Place the files in all the places where you want to test the ads in the future.

This is typically:

• Under the header – the 728 x 60 (ad or Adsense link unit)
• Under the headline of each article – in top of the content
• Under the menu – typically 160 x 600
• On the right side as the third column – 160 x 600
• At the bottom of the article – ad, link unit or Adsense search field

Once you have the files in place and want to start testing, simply upload one Includes file to your server, and the ad code will appear on all pages that include the Includes file.

After that, it’s a simple matter of testing different combinations and finding the one that performs best.

2. Setting Up Channels For Main Pages

Another method of setting up channels is to assign a channel for each main and all the related pages of your website.

For example: On my vacuum cleaner website, I have main pages like Dyson, Eureka, Hoover, upright, bagless, and other types of vacuums.

Each main page has related articles: the Dyson page links to all reviews of specific Dyson models like the DC14, DC15, and so on.

You can now set up a channel called “Dyson” and use it on all ads across the Dyson-related articles. Similarly, do this for all Eureka, Hoover, and other types of pages.

Why is this useful?

After a few days of testing and comparing, you will realize that certain brands pay much more per click than the others!

Your goal is now to direct as much traffic as possible to the higher paying pages.

How can you do that?

a) Use internal links to send more pagerank and visitors to the higher paying pages.
b) Create more external links pointing to these pages to improve their rankings and, consequently, the traffic they receive.
c) Use the navigation bar rearrangement trick explained in How I Increased Adsense and Chitika Revenue By 20% in 10 Minutes.

Similarly, you can use the Google Adwords tool to find the highest paying keywords in your niche.

Then, use the three tips above to send more pagerank and traffic to the pages optimized for these high paying keywords.

How I did It

I use SBI Includes, which allows me to prepare the monetization of pages long before I actually use the code and test different versions of ads.

Here’s an example of how an Includes file looks in my HTML for my top left Adsense block:

I can align the code to the left or right of the text with the simple <table align=«left« or align=«right«. It’s also very easy to generate new code inside the Adsense account if you want to test different sizes of ads.

Here’s how the page looks live:

Recently, I have been testing the 160 x 600 ad block below my menu. I tested Google Adsense, Chitika eMiniMalls, Chitika ShopCloud, Amazon Omakase and Amazon Product Cloud.

So far, Google Adsense is the best earner in that position with a good CTR. One reason for that my be the Adsense and Chitika combos that I use to draw visitors’ attention to the side ads, which typically get quite a low CTR.

I still check my Chitika best paying channels often, since the advertisers often change their payments then I simply rearrange my navigation using the Site Build It Navigation tool and am easily able to increase my Adsense and Chitika earnings in just a few minutes.

I have also tested various affiliate programs on my vacuum site and been pleasantly surprised with the eBay affiliate program through CJ.com.

I’ve placed eBay links only on those product pages where a customer cannot get an a vacuum online, like, for example, Kirby and Rainbow models.

One word of caution: there is a danger of becoming too obsessed trying to squeeze every last bit of revenue from your website. While you may achieve your goal of maximizing your revenue, you may also lose a lot of time and, consequently, the freedom that you were looking for in the first place.

The purpose of the last step – Enjoying Freedom – is to find the right balance between working from home on your online business and enjoying the financial freedom that this business gives you.

I’ve thought about this a lot and will share my freedom ideas tomorrow, when everything is still a theory.

Of course, you’ll soon be able to read what I have learned from enjoying financial independence and working from home on my online business.

Next: Step 10: Enjoying Financial Independence And Making The Best Of Yourself

In case you want to start at the beginning, here are the steps covered so far:

1. Freedom Starts in the Mind
2. 5 Reasons to Follow Your Passion Instead of Money
3. How to Make Money Online and Enjoy Freedom
4. Ken Evoy and Site Build It
5. How to Write Content That Attracts Visitors And Natural Links
6. On-page Search Engine Optimization
7. Make Your Site Known – Link-Building Strategies

When to Monetize

You need to consider two factors when thinking about monetizing your website:

1. What is your link popularity?

When your website is young and you want to add links to it, you’ll have a much better chance of getting a good quality link if there are no ads or affiliate links on your site.

Even better, if your website shows some pagerank and has no or very few ads, you’ll be able to get more links than you would if your website was full of ads.

Why this is so may be the subject of another article, but for now just trust me — this is the way the Internet and link-building work.

So as long as you don’t have many good-quality incoming links, refrain from monetizing. This strategy will be well worth the wait.

2. How many daily visitors do you have?

For some people, earning the first dollar online is a big thing. At least it was for me.

So I understand the difficulty of restraining yourself from putting AdSense or other types of ads on your website when you see your first few visitors.

Even if you get 100 visitors per day, you’ll typically get around 10 clicks per day on your ads and, in an average niche, the payout will be around $1.

So earning $1 per day is a practically neglible amount compared to your normal daily expenditure, but it can be quite difficult to get good links that could significantly improve your rankings.

How to Monetize

Remember that your strategy of becoming financially independent and finding time to work on your website would mean creating one with a large enough content that makes money almost on autopilot.

The best way to achieve such freedom would be to monetize the website with either contextual ads, affiliate links, or possibly by selling your own digital products.

Let’s see the most effective strategies for each method.

1. How to Make The Most Of Contextual Advertising

Contextual advertising works by automatically identifying your content and serving matching ads to it.

a) Google AdSense

The most popular contextual advertising network is Google AdSense.

It’s very easy to use – just copy and paste the javascript code onto your pages and Google will automatically select related ads based on your content.

Here are five tips for maximizing your AdSense revenue:

1. Blend the colors of the ads and match them with the colors of your links and titles.

2. Place the ads above the fold. The most effective position is the top left block in your content, typically under the title. 300×250 and 336×228 are the most effective ad sizes.

3. Place no more than two ads per page with possibly one link unit and one search field. The more ads you have, the less you will get per click from the ads that are positioned lower on your page.

Don’t lose visitors for those low-paying ads, but instead redirect them with a link to a new article on a new page where they will start reading again from the top and possibly click on a higher paying ad.

4. Improve AdSense targeting with section targeting.

5. Use channels to track and test, test, test.

b) Chitika

Chitika is best used on product-oriented websites and blogs.

What’s really cool about Chitika is that they allow contextual and keyword-targeted ads (which means you can select products or a range of products based on a keyword).

Here are five tips on making the best of Chitika:

1. Place one unit (typically 468 x 60 banner) above the fold based on keyword targeting.

2. Use Chitika eMiniMalls throughout your article everytime you mention or review a certain product. 300 x 250 and 250 x 250 single-product units work well.

3. Use Chitika Multi Product Units (MPU) at the end of the article to give your visitors more choices after reading your review.

4. Include Chitika Linx (which underlines keywords) with up to three links per page. I get around 4% CTR, which is excellent.

5. Use Chitika Related Products links at the bottom or at the side of the article. They can blend really well with the related articles section.

Chitika ads can also be used in conjuction with Google AdSense. You can download a free ebook from Chitika which includes five tips from expert publishers (one of them is me) and check my article about AdSense and Chitika combos that will skyrocket your CTR.

There are more contextual advertising networks like Yahoo Publisher, Adbrite and others, but I haven’t used them so far.

Masternewmedia has published a great list of AdSense alternatives which can give you many more options on how to best monetize your website with contextual ads.

2. How to maximize your affiliate links revenue

Earning money through affiliate marketing gives you freedom and the luxury of not having to deal with customer support and everything else which comes with selling a product.

You can find products and services that you want to promote on your website through:

1. Clickbank
2. CJ (Commission Junction)
3. Share-a-sale

Among many others…

Here are five tips on how to make the best of your affiliate commissions:

a) Blend your affiliate links into the content. Banners are typically not effective since visitors have seen so many during their Internet surfing that they have become blind to them.

Your affiliate links need to look the same as your other links in your content.

b) Hide the affiliate links code. There is this human emotion called envy — it’s very strong and causes a lot of misery in our world.

Internet-savvy users know exactly what an affiliate link looks like and they may just copy the code to the product you are promoting without your affiliate code at the end, which gives you commission from the sale.

If you suspect such activity, you can hide the affiliate link so the visitor cannot see the code of the link in the bottom left-hand corner of their browser.

The simplest option is to use the following code:

<A href=”http://www.myaffiliateprogram.com?xxxx” onMouseOver= “window.status=’Your message’; return true” onMouseOut= “window.status=”; return true”>Click here</a>

This will hide your affiliate code and display »Your message« that you used in the above code.

You can find other ways of hiding your affiliate links by simply searching for »hide affiliate links« in Google.

c) Use »nofollow« on your affiliate links. Nofollow will prevent any loss of pagerank from your page. The purpose of your link is to make money and not to count as a vote of confidence to the other websites you are linked to.

3. Creating your own digital products

If you create (or buy and resell) digital products, you’ll get the full revenue of the product instead of just a few percent from the sale.

The critical process in selling your own digital products are sales letters. Writing an effective sales letter is an art and takes a lot of time to master.

There are of course some guidelines on how to write a perfect sales letter which can help you get started.

Another key selling factor for digital products are cover graphics. They will entice the visitor to click on the sales letter and make them believe how good the product is once they have read it.

My tennis products graphics and headers were designed by Thomas Breher from Ecoverdesign.com and I am very pleased with them.

Another great resource for ebook covers and headers is Killercovers.com. You won’t be dissapointed with any of those experts on ebooks and graphics design.

Selling your own digital products is the most profitable way to earn money online, especially if you have other affiliates promoting your product.

There are, for example, 351 affiliates promoting my How to Play Tennis videos, and according to Clickbank stats, affiliate sales account for 43% of my income from it.

Creating your own digital product takes the most effort and time, but it’s also very rewarding. I am getting sales almost every day from the ebooks I wrote in 2005 and videos I created earlier this year.

How I did it

I’ve already given you many examples of what I did to jumpstart my journey towards financial freedom and here’s one more:

I have a pagerank 4 website (a year old) which I intent to monetize with AdSense, but I still haven’t put any ads on it. It’s in a very competitive conferencing field and I am still working on getting quality link partners for it.

It doesn’t receive much traffic (around 100 visitors per day) though it has many pages of good quality content. The reason is, of course, the competition in this field.

So, I have been building content and links to this site and I can include AdSense with only one upload of AdSense code to the Includes file, which I used in the HTML code.

Eventually, the age of the domain and slow but steady link-building will bring higher search-engine rankings and more traffic. I can wait.

Next: Step 9: Test And Tweak To Maximize Your Website Income

In case you have missed the first six steps, you might want to start at the beginning:

1. Freedom Starts in the Mind
2. 5 Reasons to Follow Your Passion Instead of Money
3. How to Make Money Online and Enjoy Freedom
4. Ken Evoy and Site Build It
5. How to Write Content That Attracts Visitors And Natural Links
6. On-page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Beginners and Experts

Why Build Links?

Links pointing to your website are the key to ranking high in the search engines, especially Google.

If another website links to your website and even includes the keyword you want to rank for in the anchor text, this sends a clear message to Google and other search engines that your site should rank highly, especially is the keyword is used in the anchor text.

Sidebar: Anchor text is the text included in a link pointing to your website. If someone links to this blog with the anchor text Financial freedom, it tells Google that this blog is about achieving financial freedom.

If someone linked to this blog with the anchor text “Click here,” the blog would receive a vote of confidence, but it wouldn’t necessarily improve its rankings for the keyword “financial freedom.” Instead, it would rank slightly better for the keyword “Click here.”

End Sidebar

A website with quality content but no external links is practically invisible to search engines.

What’s also important to remember is that a link from a related website counts much more than a link from a non-related website.

For example, if someone from a financially related website links to this financial freedom-related blog, it would improve this site’s rankings much more than if someone from a dogs-related website links to it.

There is also a theory that one-way links weigh much more in terms of benefits than reciprocal links do. This theory makes sense, although I haven’t seen any statistical proof of this claim anywhere on the web.

I don’t worry too much whether I receive a one-way or a reciprocal link, so long as it is from a closely related website on a quality page. This means that my site’s link is not buried among tens, or even hundreds, of other external links on page that almost no one visits.

5 Main Strategies of Building Links

Before you start working on getting the incoming links, you must make your site worthy of receiving a link.

I suggest that you build your site to at least 50 pages of high quality content with pictures, videos (if possible), and links to other useful websites. Putting ads and affiliate links on your site decreases the chances of getting a good link, so refrain from monetizing for now.

Sidebar: You can monetize your site a little bit without links; with 50 built pages, you’ll probably receive 20 to 30 daily visitors.

If 5% of those click on Adsense or other types of ads on your website, you’ll earn around 10 to 20 cents per day.

I recommend waiting until you have at least 200 visitors per day before monetizing your site. At that point, you may earn from 5$ to $10 per day, which would make your monthly income $150 to $300.

End Sidebar

Assuming that you followed my advice and didn’t monetize, here’s how to get incoming links to your website:

1. Authority and Niche Directories

In their webmasters guidelines, Google suggests that site owners “ … submit their site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.”

Yahoo submissions cost $299 per year; in my opinion, this is a worthy investment to get one of the most trusted incoming links. If you cannot afford it right away, submit your site to Yahoo when you can.

I submitted my tennis website to Yahoo directory more than 1 year after I started it and began my journey towards financial freedom.

There are not many really trusted directories out there, since Google has hit many directories with penalties for selling pagerank.

The ones that I suggest and submit to are:

• BOTW.org
• Goguides.com
• Joeant.com
• Gimpsy.com

In addition to those, you may want to search Google for specialized directories related to your niche / topic.

2. Article submissions

There are so-called article directories that allow you to submit your article with up to 3 links back to your website.

Again, there are hundreds of different article directories, but only a few are really effective.

»Effective« means that these directories bring traffic to your website and that other webmasters pick up article from the directory to post on their own websites, again with a link back to your website.

Here are the top 5 article directories that will benefit you most, in terms of getting high quality links to your website:

1. Ezinearticles.com
2. Ideamarketers.com
3. Goarticles.com
4. Articledashboard.com
5. Articlealley.com

Do not submit an article that is already posted on your website, since you run the risk of being penalized with a duplicate content penalty.

Instead, either rewrite your article or write a new one.

There’s one more strategy for submitting articles to other websites; one of the best is to find websites related to your topic and ask them if they would accept your original article in exchange for a link back to your website.

Getting a quality link is effective in terms of improving your rankings, but it does take time to find a quality website that will accept your article in exchange for a link back.

You’ll learn how to find related websites in the next link building strategy…

3. Reciprocal links

The best reciprocal link that you can get is a link within a page that is closely related to your website’s topic.

For example, if a page on another tennis website talks about tennis tips and links to my tennis tips page with the link text “tennis tips,” this is the most effective link I can get.

Linking to another high quality website from within your site’s content is useful for both your visitors and search engines, as the search engines can recognize this relationship and rank your pages accordingly.

Linking to a low quality website can negatively affect your rankings, so you need to make sure that you approach only high quality websites related to your topic when asking for a link exchange.

Here’s where you can start your research:

a) Yahoo directory

Find the most relevant topic to your website in the Yahoo directory and email the websites listed there asking for a link exchange.

b) Google directory

Google’s directory is a mirror of DMOZ with one difference – the websites are listed according to the pagerank.

Pagerank is part of Google’s algorithm for ranking websites and can give you a good guideline of which websites are of the highest quality (or not).

Again, find the topic most closely related to your website and contact the webmasters asking for a link exchange.

c) Links, resources or partner pages of high quality websites

Many websites have their own directory of related websites with which they have exchanged links.

As you research the websites from the Yahoo and Google directories, always check to see if they have partner pages. By doing this, you can find websites that are interested in link exchanges.

What I suggest is that you don’t ask for a link from the partner pages, since they are typically low quality links, but ask for a link from within the pages’ content. Of course, you must offer the same.

There are also programs that allow you to list your website for potential link partners. I have tried many of them and can really recommend only one:

SiteSell Value Exchange

Make sure to download a free ebook from Ken Evoy (following the above link) Make Your Links WORK to get more link building tips and ideas from this prominent internet marketer.

d) Backlink analysis of your competitors

Another way to find websites where you can get a link back to your website is to find who is linking to other high quality websites on your topic.

This can be done easily with a link: www.website.com command in Yahoo.com.

Choose Show Inlinks “Except from this domain” and you can find almost all the links pointing back to the website that you have researched.

Once you find the page that links back to that website, you can also figure out a way to get your link there too.

There’s one more way to get a link back to your website – buying it.

Buying links is against Google’s webmasters guidelines and I advise you not to do it.

If you are going to follow the idea of building a large content website that will earn money day after day and provide you with the financial freedom you look for, you’ll have to rely on Google as your main traffic source.

You don’t want to be penalized by Google for buying links (which interferes with their algorithm) and lose all that precious traffic and income.

Playing by the rules of the Google game is the most reliable way to achieve financial freedom with an online business.

4. Social Networking

Social networking is the latest craze on the web with sites like Facebook, Youtube, Digg, Stumbleupon and others welcoming millions of users every day.

Some social networking websites will give you a link back (although most of them come with a no-follow tag which won’t help with the rankings in Google) and some will just send you a lot of traffic.

Here’s a list of top 30 social networking sites that you can use to get some links and attention for your website.

Note that most users of social networking sites are young males with interests in computers, cell phones, space and sports related topics and funny videos.

If your website is related to these topics, you may have good success with social networking. If, on the other hand, your topic is more “boring” like my vacuum site, you’ll probably just waste time trying to get attention from these sites.

5. Forum Signatures

Many forums allow you to place a link back to your website in your signature. Although links don’t improve your link popularity much, they can eventually add up, especially if you take a few minutes every day to post 3 or 5 answers in the forums.

This could lead to more than 1000 backlinks in a year.

Here’s a simple Google search that will help you find a forum related to your main keyword:

There are, of course, other link building tips and if you are a blog owner, you may also like my 7 Link building tips for newborn blogs.

If you are still looking for more link building tips and ideas, then brace yourself for these massive articles on how to get more backlinks to your website:

1. 101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website

2. 131 Link Building Strategies

3. 66 Ways to Build Links in 2007

Next: Intelligently Monetize Your Website

To recap, the steps we have covered so far are:

1. Freedom Starts in the Mind
2. 5 Reasons to Follow Your Passion Instead of Money
3. How to Make Money Online and Enjoy Freedom
4. Ken Evoy and Site Build It
5. How to Write Content That Attracts Visitors And Natural Links

Basic SEO Tips

Most users search the Internet via recognized search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, by entering keywords that relate to the topic or product they are trying to search for. According to Onestat.com, the typical number of keywords used in an average search is from one to four words.

The goal of on-page SEO is to inform these search engines about the content of your website – to ensure you are ranked highly in the search results – by using factors that you can control on your home page. These factors include the words you use in the title, meta tag, in the website’s content and so on.

Please note: on-page SEO is different to off-page SEO (the promotion of your website via external links). You will learn about this in Step Seven.

Using on-page SEO techniques, you can optimize a website for certain keywords. Here’s how:

1. Include important keywords in the title, possibly close to the beginning.

2. Include keywords in the meta description tag and the keywords meta tag.

3. Include keywords in the first sentence on page and possibly format it in bold.

4. Try to include both singular and plural versions of keywords close to the beginning of articles.

5. Aim for 1% keyword density of primary keywords. For example, if an article is 500 words long, include your primary keyword 4-6 times in the article.

6. Use secondary keywords once or twice in each article. Secondary keywords are tightly related keywords to the original keyword.

For example: “Dyson vacuum cleaners” is a primary keyword, whereas “Dyson vacuums” would be a secondary keyword. Similarly, in this article, the primary keyword would be “search engine optimization” and the secondary keyword would be “SEO”.

7. Include your primary keyword and its variations in all picture tags on the page.

8. Try to include one or two text links on your page that include the primary keyword in the anchor text.

9. Include links to other high-quality and/or authoritative websites, but limit yourself to three or less links per page.

10. If you need to link to a site that you don’t trust or is an affiliate link, use a “no-follow attribute” to prevent “pagerank leak” and possible penalties that may result from linking your website to a low-quality website.

You should follow these 10 tips of basic search engine optimization for every page you build. I would also recommend that you follow Google’s webmasters guidelines which give you similar tips about optimizing your pages for Google.

Of course, the structure of your website also determines how well your individual pages rank and how authoritative it appears in the particular subject.

As a result, you should make sure that:

- you organize the site into a clear hierarchical structure that is no more than two levels deeper than the home page (home page, first level, second level)
- create a sitemap that links to each page of your website (if the sitemap would contain more than 100 links, break it down onto multiple levels.)
- link back from every article to the homepage and make sure that the anchor text contains the main keywords that users will be searching for.

Advanced SEO Tips

Using more advanced search engine optimization techniques will help you to gain key advantages over rivals in competitive markets or help you to rank highly in less competitive markets with much less needed incoming links.

Besides following all the basic search engine optimization tips outlined above, you can also employ more advanced techniques, such as:

1. Use themed keywords across your articles. Themed keywords are words commonly found in pages that rank highly in search engines for your primary keyword.

If you are an expert in your topic or industry, then these themed keywords should be clear to you; in fact, you’ll probably include them naturally while explaining your topic.

In case of Dyson vacuum cleaners mentioned above, the primary keyword is “Dyson vacuum cleaners”, but themed keywords would include: “cleaning”, “Dyson DC15″, “DC 14″, “DC 17″, “upright”, and so on.

If you are not an expert in the topic, and you want to find relevant themed words, then one way of doing that is to use the Google Adword tool to check site-related keywords for the top 10 sites listed in Google for each particular keyword.

The keyword tool will list most of the themed keywords on the page, and once you repeat the process for all 10 websites, you’ll have a pretty good idea which keywords are commonly associated with your primary keyword.

It is time consuming, but it does provide results. Alternatively, you can use one of the few keyword tools that cover Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI).

Nichebot.com offers a great LSI tool for members and provides free LSI report for all non-members. Membership costs only $9,95 per month. If you are not a member, you can still download a free LSI report here.

You may also want to check on of my previous articles about finding related keywords.

Another keyword tool, which is based on LSI and search-engine-proven synonyms is Themezoom.com. The full version is quite expensive, but you can get a “lite” version by signing up for University2020.com which costs $97 per month.

2. Include “thesauric” and search engine proven synonyms on the page (or in subheads)

A thesauric synonym is a word or a keyword that is considered a synonym in a thesaurus.

Check the synonyms for clean on www.synonym.com/synonyms/clean.

A search-engine-proven synonym is a word or a keyword that is very often associated with your primary keyword on the web.

You can find these keywords by using a ~ (tilde) operator in Google and by looking for keywords listed in bold.

Google for example emboldens the following keywords when you search for ~clean:

CleanUp, cleaner, clear, cleaning

3. Only link between internal pages within your “silo”. A silo is a popular term which describes one of the main pages of your website – typically a menu page – that includes links to related articles of that page.

For example, if your site is about vacuum cleaners, than one of the silos / main pages could be Dyson vacuum cleaners which would include links to each individual Dyson model (DC 14, DC 15, DC 17, …) under review.

The key to receiving high rankings for your Dyson-related articles, and the main Dyson page, is to link them to each other if needed, but also to ensure that there are no links to, for example, Eureka vacuum cleaners. These should be covered by another silo / main page.

How I Did It

I learned everything I know about basic search engine optimization from the Site Build It Action Guide.

Site Build It tools also include an SEO Analyzer which checks every page you build for these basic SEO techniques.

For example, if there is something missing or if you’ve used too many keywords on a page (which could trigger spam flags in search engines) the Analyzer will remind you before you build the page.

Therefore you just need to tweak the page until it passes the Analyzer. In my opinion, this is 90% of the on-page SEO that you need to do.

The Action Guide also suggests the above-mentioned hierarchical site structure and some advanced ways of linking the pages internally to make your pages rank higher in natural search results.

I built my websites using these basic SEO suggestions and made sure that every page passed the SEO Analyzer before I built it.

As a result, I eventually became more interested in advanced search engine optimization and learned a lot from other SEO experts.

I also wasted a lot of time reading and trying to apply conflicting theories of various internet marketers.

A word of caution: as more advanced SEO is to an attempt to reverse engineer the algorithms of search engines, especially Google, some of it is pure guesswork.

Therefore, most of what you read is basically theory.

At present, there is no 100% proof that the tips you read will actually help your pages rank higher. However, in my experience, the following internet marketers do actually add something useful to your knowledge of SEO:

1. Dr. Andy Williams – Search Engine Optimization Strategies (ezseonews.com)

2. Charles Heflin – Internet Marketing for the New Generation (seo2020.com)

3. Steve Nash – Search Engine Optimization Tips (howipromotemywebsite.com)

Next: Step Seven: Make Yourself Known – Link Building Strategies and Tips

1. Freedom Starts in the Mind
2. 5 Reasons to Follow Your Passion Instead of Money
3. How to Make Money Online and Enjoy Freedom
4. Ken Evoy and Site Build It

The purpose of step 5 is to help you create quality content for your website that stands out from the crowd and will rank high in search engines. The most important tips are:

1. Don’t worry about your writing ability
2. Don’t worry about grammar or spelling
3. Focus on Your Visitors (not SEO)
4. Deliver QUALITY content
5. REMEMBER: where there’s a will, there’s a way

But let’s first start in your mind again, since there may be some mental blocks that stop you from even starting.

Here are the two most common obstacles:

1. I am not a writer! How can I write good articles?

I understand: I am also not a writer; I am a tennis coach! Hundreds of people on this page are not writers and yet they have very successful websites.

If you have decided to follow your passion you are undoubtedly an expert of your field EVEN if you don’t think so.

Sometimes we think we must be perfect to share our knowledge. Or we think that since we didn’t graduate in gardening, we cannot share tips on gardening.

That’s a limiting belief that stops you from taking action.

You will find that there are thousands of people who can benefit from your knowledge – and it doesn’t have to about the latest research in nuclear physics.

Remember, people don’t read on the web in the same way as they do books. On the web, people scan to get to the most relevant information in the shortest amount of time.

That’s why websites like www.wikihow.com are extremely popular: because of the simplicity and usefulness of the information.

Surely you could write a short how-to article about you topic, right?

And if you can do that, you can expand the article and explain things in a little more detail.

Writing for the web is similar to explaining to something you know about to a friend.

This brings me to the second block…

2. I tried writing, but I keep making grammar mistakes. Then I correct them and my writing stops.

Exactly. So don’t do it.

When you write do it just as your thoughts come to you. Stay with the flow and just write.

You can edit LATER!

You’ll probably edit your article a few times before you are happy with the structure and the whole flow of it.

Remember, the web isn’t as formal as published articles: you can write as you speak, and as long as your visitors can understand what you mean, that’s fine.

So don’t worry about grammar mistakes, just write, write, write …

3. Don’t Worry About SEO, Focus On Visitors First

Now that you’ve gotten to the point of writing without worrying about mistakes and you are on the roll, you’ll need to find a way to please both visitors and search engines.

But the truth is, that SEO (or search engine optimization) on your page is quite a simple thing. If you follow a few simple principles of optimizing your page for the search engines, you’ll easily rank high for many keywords on that page.

(You’ll learn SEO basic and advanced tips in the next step.)

Google doesn’t expect millions of people to master the art of SEO. Google, Yahoo and other search engines are smart enough to figure out what your page is about and whether it was written by an expert, without needing it to be perfectly SEO optimized.

That’s why it’s better to focus on delivering QUALITY information (and not necessarily quantity).

Remember to write for your visitors point of view. It is tempting to put down everything you know, explaining with lots of detail.

But think about what is most relevant to your visitor – they might want to learn ‘how to’ without to much information on ‘why’. Aim for simplicity.

Let me show one extremely simple, very useful in very successful website following the principle of writing for visitors from someone who is an expert in one simple thing:

http://www.tie-a-tie.net/

Caspar, the owner of this website, created it to explain how to tie a tie. It attracts several thousand visitors every day.

He offers simple, useful information, most of which is free.

That way he attracts many natural links (like the ones I have given him here) is by offering genuinely useful information.

You’ll see that his articles are very simple and easy for anyone to understand.

And on top of that, Casper offers his information in a video format, which you can buy for only $13,95!

You can only imagine how many of those he sells every day …

This is one of the best examples of how you can help thousands of people every day without needing to write complicated or perfect articles on your topic.

4. Why You Should Deliver Quality Content That Attracts Natural Links

Writing highly valuable content for your website will benefit you for years and it’s different to sharing knowledge offline.

Let’s talk about tennis. I have given many excellent tennis lessons, with top quality coaching information, where the intensity of practice made for a fun and exciting session.

But in a practice session only a few players benefit and after that I have to create a similar lesson the next day. And the next… And the next…

The sad thing about the offline world is that after you give your best effort and your most creative it’s lost forever.

Not so on the web.

If I create a high quality tennis lesson on the web, it will help people every day to improve their game.

It will become more and more popular as people bookmark it and link to it.

A service like Addthis.com can show you which pages visitors have bookmarked on your site and how many times.

As you can see many visitors have bookmarked my pages and you can check one of the pages here to see what I mean by delivering on quality content and useful information:

Topspin Tennis Serve

One of the most important factors in whether your page / website ranks high in search engines are links from other websites pointing to yours.

This counts as a vote of confidence in your content’s quality and will significantly improve your rankings. But in order for your page to gain natural links it must be different and better than thousands of other pages on similar topic.

(Sidebar:

Natural links are links that are created without you asking the owner of the other website for the link in return for a favor, another link or money.

Natural links happen because other webmasters feel that a link to your website will benefit their visitors even if they leave their website through the link to your website. This is a true vote of confidence and it’s one of the most important ranking factors of search engines.

End Sidebar)

That’s why I suggest you give your best and put 100% effort into creating high quality content. You may have to write it only once but in time it will attract more and more natural links that will help that page rank ever higher.

Once the page moves up the rankings, it will receive even more links and slowly but surely start to dominate the search engines.

Here’s an example of how a page about Andre Agassi gained great natural links because it was original and different from many of the boring biographies of this great tennis legend.

The Ultimate Test Of Whether Your Content Rocks

How can you really know that it’s not only Google and a few webmasters that think that your content deserves high rankings, but also many visitors?

This ultimate test is being found through word of mouth.

This means that your website is not being found by a specific keyword that you are trying to rank high (like tennis tips, mental tennis, tennis instruction and so on) but by the actual name of the website.

This tells you that someone has told the new visitor the name of the website and now they want to find it on the web.

Here’s what I mean:

As you can see, my tennis website has been found 68 times in the month of November for the keyword tennismindgame and 55 times for the keyword tennis mind game.

Both these keywords mean these visitors found my website through word of mouth and typed the exact website name into the search engines.

(These keywords by themselves don’t really make sense so it’s logical that the visitor was looking for my website name.)

Once you know that you are getting found through the word of mouth, you know that your content deserves high rankings and provides great value.

How I did It

There are many examples above of how I created quality content. But let me share one more major obstacle that I had to overcome.

The Language Barrier.

English is not my first language and I wasn’t able to speak fluent English until I had spent a month in the USA in 2000.

And yet I decided to write my website in English (with some pages in Slovenian too), though my English was far from perfect.

How did I solve that problem?

At first, I tried to write simple English sentences, which I knew were correct. I also read and reread my articles many times to find and correct any parts that didn’t sound right.

Later I asked my cousin, who had studied English language at University if she could proofread my articles.

She liked the idea since it gave her the chance to practice her knowledge of English grammar and English syntax.

I offered her a fee, which she kindly halved, and this made it very cheap for me to put articles in good English on my website.

For my first ebook I asked a friend whom I met at a seminar in London if she could proofread it. She did it for free. Which reminds me, I must send her a Christmas card again…

Later I became good friends with Kathy Krajco from OperationDoubles.com. We helped each other with links and tips about website design and optimization.

Kathy also works as a freelance writer and editor and she was happy to edit and proofread my articles for a very affordable fee.

And a little later when my online income exploded, I came across Scribendi.com which I now use for almost all of my tennis articles and posts that I write for this blog.

And yes, this post was edited by a Scribendi editor too.

Scribendi services cost more than my friends charged me, but I don’t mind since they provide top quality editing and proofreading and allow payment through paypal which is very convenient.

Hopefully this example will show you that there is always a way to find a solution.

Where there is a will, there is a way.

Next: Basic And Advanced SEO Tips

If you’ve missed the previous posts, then you might want to start reading at the beginning:

Step 1: The Freedom Starts In the Mind
Step 2: 5 Reasons To Follow Your Passion Instead Of Money
Step 3: How To Make Money Online and Enjoy Freedom

Just a quick reminder from the previous step: you learned that there are three main strategies or ways of earning money online, but only one of them gives you the freedom of working whenever and wherever you want (so long as you have an internet connection).

This strategy is about creating a large-content website that relies on free search engine traffic to bring hundreds or thousands of visitors per day on your website.

You can then monetize this traffic by selling your own digital products or referring visitors to other merchants who sell either physical or digital products and earn commissions in the process.

The main question now concerns who is going to teach you how to build a successful website and where will you get the tools you need to do it.

Meet Dr. Ken Evoy

Ken Evoy is a Canadian medical doctor who, early in his career, realized that he would never be totally free by working in a hospital.

He decided to venture open his own business (toy and game design), and eventually became extremely successful by licensing over 20 designs to large companies and generating millions of dollars in sales and royalties.

In 1996, Ken started using the Internet as a way to promote and sell a software package he wrote for his highly specialized, niche investment strategy .

Through testing and applying his already successful business principles, Ken mastered the art of developing a successful website capable of bringing in free search engine traffic and converting these targeted visitors into customers.

In November 1997, Ken launched www.sitesell.com with the purpose of helping other people reach financial freedom through the power of Internet.

His Make Your Site Sell ebook, written in 1999 became The Bible of selling on the Internet, and has sold more than 100,000 copies to date.

The 2002 overhauled version, with over 1500 pages, is now free for download.

What Is Site Build It?

I’ll let Ken Evoy explain to you what Site Build It is and how it can help you achieve financial freedom.

I also suggest that you take the time to check the video tour of Site Build It after the short 2- minute video. Just click on the video after it has finished.

How I did it

After I decided that I also wanted to run my own website, I asked a friend in the IT business to help me create one. He suggested a company that eventually built a website for me for $700.

I had the ability to write text and add graphics and I thought this was a good deal.

(Of course, no one taught me how to build substantial traffic to the website. I thought it would just happen.

But the fact is, you need to understand how the Internet and search engines work and use that to create high-ranking pages on your website.)

I later decided to add a newsletter module and the company told me this would cost an additional $300.

I thought to mself : Wow, and if later I decide to add a form module, or an RSS module or a tracker module, they are going to charge me again and again and …

I started researching to find a better, more affordable solution and came across Site Build It.

At first I thought that there was no way I could get all these tools for the price of my newsletter module from the old company.

I started searching the web to learn more about Ken Evoy and the Site Build It product and found hundreds of articles praising Ken, the Make Your Site Sell ebook, and Site Build It (SBI).

On November 1, 2005 I made my first purchase of Site Build It and on the November 6th, I registered www.tennismindgame.com.

Fast forward two years – I am close to earning $10,000 per month with only 2 SBI websites with 2 more in the early stages (I am now creating content and building links).

I created quality content and let SBI do the grunt work behind the scenes, like submitting to search engines, distributing my RSS feed, building an automatic blog, and much more.

This attracts more and more daily visitors to my websites (one gets around 1000 visitors per day, the other almost 3000) and increases my daily income.

The more I give – useful content – the more I receive – traffic and income.

Site Build It changes lives and I invite you to have a look at the videos that many customers have created to share why they love SBI.

P.S. Did you find my video?

Next: How to Write Content That Attracts Visitors And Natural Links

The first step showed you how freedom starts in the mind; the second step was about following your passion instead of money.

There are many different ways to earn money online. Some of these methods give you much more freedom than others.

What I will suggest in this article is a method of earning money with your website that requires you to work for a few months without any immediate reward, but pays off later, when there is almost no work required to generate income.

Let’s first take a quick look at the most common ways of earning money with a website and examine their pros and cons:

1. Selling a physical product

You can set up a website to sell physical products via your existing or new business. Let’s say you want to sell tennis equipment.

Pros:

• The location of your store is not that important, since people can find your website and, consequently, your products through search engines and other websites.

• You will have more visitors to your store than just the people who might find its physical location.

Cons:

• You either need to manufacture or buy products and then sell them again. This costs you time and money, and your return on investment is very low.

• Someone has to take care of shipping the products to your store from the manufacturer, and someone has to send the products to customers. This, again, costs you a lot of time and money.

• Someone has to take care of customer support. If you hire someone to do this, they will cost you money and may not respond to your customers’ needs the way you would want them to. You’ll need to be in constant contact and you’ll never be free.

2. Using advertising networks to sell your own digital products or promote someone else’s physical or digital products.

This means that you refer visitors to affiliate programs like Amazon.com and receive a commission on their sales of physical products.

You can also refer visitors to merchants who sell digital products and receive commissions on sales, or refer visitors to your own digital products.

Your method of referring visitors to the merchants is through paid advertising on Google, Yahoo, Overture and other networks.

Pros:

• You can start earning money in hours of setting up your advertising campaign.

• If you use more keywords to bid, you’ll be able to send even more traffic to the merchant sites and receive even more sales commissions.

Cons:

• The competition is often very tough, especially in high-paying niches. Advertising will cost you a lot of money and your return on investment (ROI) may be very low.

• Before you master the pay-per-click (PPC) method of advertising, you will inevitably lose a lot of money. Every mistake you make here will cost you money.

• You will have to monitor and adjust your keywords, bids and other factors constantly, depending on how the market adjusts the prices and how your competitors adjust their ads. You will never be free.

3. Drive traffic to your own digital products or affiliate programs with free search engine traffic

This means creating a large content website that ranks high in the search engines for many different keywords related to the products you want to promote. These can be your own digital products or someone else’s physical or digital products.

Pros:

• Search engine traffic is free. Google, Yahoo and other search engines refer visitors to your website every day without any effort from your side.

• There is almost no work needed after the initial setup and promotion of your website – getting links to it. You can occasionally update the website with a new page (perhaps once a week), but you don’t have to stick to any schedule. You can upload four pages in one day and then update the website one month later.

• The older your website is and the better its rankings, the higher it will rank in search engines. It will also gain natural links through time and rank even better.

• The website becomes your own personal ATM machine, earning money automatically, even while you sleep. Unless you sell your own digital products you have no products to ship, no orders and no customer support. You are free.

Cons:

• You can miss your choice of a niche and build a website that targets a niche too broad that has too much competition, or a niche too narrow that doesn’t have enough demand. Both mistakes are correctable though, once you see how much traffic your site receives daily.

• It takes many pages of quality content, lots of initial work in getting links from other websites, and lots of time to make a website start ranking high enough to be competitive. A typical high-traffic website requires more than 100 pages of content and is at least six months old before it can expect more than 300 – 500 visitors per day.

• Unless you followed the advice from the second step, to follow your passion, you may lose motivation to keep working on your website for months without getting anything in return.

As you can see, you can become financially free and earn money through the Internet in three basic ways, but it is only the last one – building a large, high-traffic authority website – that gives you total freedom for your time and total freedom for your mind.

Yes, the initial stage of creating quality content and getting links to the website takes time and and energy, but isn’t this ONE TIME investment of time and energy worth your freedom?

(Not to mention the constant cash flow into your bank account without you having to do anything?)

I once took a five-day trip to Singapore (departing from Bangkok and coming back), only checked my emails for a few minutes each day, and earned, thanks to the steady income from my websites, $400 more in those five days than I spent on air fare, hotel accommodations, food, and other expenses.

Heck, I even bought the complete 24 – Season Five on 6 DVDs.

If you think that this is the life you want to enjoy and that this is the right path to financial and personal freedom, then let’s discover who can teach you how to build a successful website and which product has proven time and time again that it can over-deliver on the the promise of online success.

Next: Ken Evoy and Site Build It

Most likely, the first question that will come to mind after you have decided to become financially free by working from home will be, “What will my website be about?”

In general you have two choices – following your passion or following the money.

The best option, of course, would be if your passion is also a profitable topic, but that’s often not the case.

My suggestion is to follow your passion, and here are 5 reasons why:

1. When you start your journey towards financial freedom by building your own website, you’ll be a beginner.

Beginners lack the experience (this applies to any field from tennis, music, and driving to building successful websites) and thus make mistakes.

Your passion will give you energy and commitment to push through the temporary setbacks that happen to every business and even to experienced people.

If you start a website writing articles about a topic that doesn’t interest you and there’s not much success at the beginning, you may lose the motivation that you’ve built up following the ideas from the previous step / article.

2. Building a successful website and earning at least $500 per month takes, on average, around 6 to 12 months.

Your passion will help you to keep building quality content and promoting your website even if there may no immediate, obvious results.

Search engines like Google and Yahoo give a lot of importance to the age of your website. When your website is still “young,” it is unlikely that it will get a lot of free traffic from search engines.

As soon as you break the one year age, things change.

Your passion and motivation to become financially independent will push you through this one-year “hump” stage, after which your traffic and earnings may start to increase rapidly every month.

3. When you are passionate about a subject, you soon become an expert on that topic.

Your expertise will show through your writings and distinguish your website from the thousands of useless websites written by ghost writers hired to write about a topic based only on a few keywords.

Your expertise will provide visitors with great benefits, so they will often come back to your website for new advice.

They will also spread the word by linking to your website (if they have their own blog or website) or by recommending your website to their friends.

The latest search engines’ technology – especially Google’s – is able to determine the relevancy and expertise of the pages by looking at all the keywords in the page.

If you really know the subject, you will include words in the page that non-experts don’t even know about.

Google will be able to recognize this and reward you with higher rankings.

4. You cannot succeed in business, whether offline or online, on your own.

You need business associates; if you are passionate about and experienced with your topic, other experts will quickly recognize this and be willing to partner with you.

Of course, you will always find immature business people who will think that you are their competitor.

The fact is, cooperation ALWAYS brings much better results to both parties than competition. Remember, you have no competitors, only potential business opportunities.

5. Passion for and expertise with your topic will create a large following among the visitors to your website.

They will trust you and will be willing to buy any future products that you may develop. You can also recommend other people’s products and earn commission by referring your trusted visitors to them.

The hundreds and thousands of visitors who come to your website daily will test your advice in real life and soon discover whether you really know what you are talking about.

it is only by being passionate about and experienced with your topic that you’ll be able to help solve other people’s problems and, in return, gain their trust so that they will help grow your income by coming back again and again.

How I did it

My passion and expertise is tennis. I have been playing tennis for more than 20 years and have been a professional tennis coach for 12 years.

I am most passionate about the mental part of the game, so I chose this niche as the topic for my website.

I decided to write an ebook about the mental game and sell it on my website. The ebook didn’t earn me millions of dollars but it did pave the way by showing other tennis webmasters and the hundreds of visitors who bought it that I know my stuff.

This helped me grow my subscriber list and establish good relationships with other tennis websites which, in return, link to my website and send visitors to it.

I later created a survey and found out that more than 50% of the visitors who come to my website want to learn tennis strokes through instructional videos. In response to this desire, I created “How to play tennis” videos for tennis beginners and doubled my monthly income from my tennis website.

I plan to create another video based-product in the near future for more advanced players.

My passion for and expertise with tennis make it easy for me to come up with ideas and useful products for tennis players, and with the power of Internet I am able to serve and help thousands of players, even while I am sleeping or on vacation.

Next: How to Make Money Online and Enjoy Freedom

The purpose of this series is to show you the way to financial and personal freedom that you can achieve working from home using online business.)

Your journey to financial and personal independence starts with a decision.

It’s very unlikely that you’ll become financially free if this is only a wish or something you just dream about it.

A decision is a consequence of two things: a burning desire for freedom and believing that you can achieve it.

1. A Burning Desire For Freedom

If you already have a burning desire to become financially free then you’re already halfway there.

If not, here are some tips on how to grow from just wishful thinking into unstoppable motivation:

a) One of the strongest motivating factors for people is peer pressure. If most people around you drive a nice car, you will work very hard to do that too.

(Read this interesting article about Silicon Valley millionaires and how they feel pressured to earn even more money to keep up with others. This is an example of peer pressure and how money alone cannot really make you happy.)

If most people around you feel satisfied in their 9 to 5 job and see nothing wrong with it, so will you.

You have to surround yourself with people who are already free. You need to interact with them and start getting the feel for freedom.

If that is not possible in your circumstances, read books and blogs about financial freedom. This will help you realize that there are many people who are already free and who feel extremely happy about it.

b) Increase the emotional pain of being a slave to the point where you get sick of it. Human beings are in the most basic way driven by pleasure and avoidance of pain.

Your goal here is to increase the emotional suffering of not being free so that this feeling will grow to the point where you cannot stand it anymore.

Once you reach that point, you’ll make the decision to break free from the slavery of having a boss and working endless hours for someone else’s benefit.

Note that your mind will want to protect you from pain even if you consciously want to increase it. That’s why you can start thinking about the disadvantages of not being free and then “suddenly become distracted” with something else and forget about your previous thoughts.

The mind will try to do its job of protecting us, and that’s one of the main reasons why so many people never break free.

You have to win the battle of the mind. You will need to keep reminding yourself how much you dislike your current situation until you reach the point where you get totally sick of it and decide to do something about it.

So keep thinking about all the negatives of working for someone else, how you will have to do this until your retirement, how many things you are going to miss in life and how someone lives very nicely because they exploit your good work ethic.

Think those thoughts every day and grow your pain of not being free to the point where you’ve finally had enough.

c) Imagine the benefits of being wealthy and free. Your goal is to increase the desire for pleasure and satisfaction that financial freedom gives you.

Think of all the benefits of having a lot of money like:

• being able to travel
• being able to buy all the things you need to live a good life
• being able to afford even more luxurious goods and services for special occasions
• not being stressed out about your debt and the future
• …

And then think of all the benefits of being free like:

• being able to take a vacation whenever you want and for as long as you want ( the fact that we see as normal, someone else ALLOWING us to have a vacation only at certain times and for a short period of time, is unbelievable to me. We have been totally brainwashed to accept this.)
• being able to talk and enjoy time with friends and family whenever you want and for as long as you want
• creating your own work schedule and setting your own hours
• not having to waste your life and suffer hours in everyday traffic jams
• …

Think and read about the benefits and all the advantages of financial and personal freedom as much as you can (since now you are still probably a slave and don’t have enough time to do what YOU want) and this will bring you to the point where you’ll decide that freedom is something you MUST have.

2. Unshakeable Belief That You Can Achieve Financial Freedom

Another reason why so many people still suffer in 9 to 5 jobs that they don’t like and never even try to become free, is that they don’t believe they can do it.

If you have a burning desire to become free but don’t believe that you can achieve it, you’ll never even attempt to do something about it.

And of course, unless you win a lottery no one will just give you enough money to be free.

Here’s how you can start believing that you can achieve financial freedom:

a) Look around you! There are many people who did it before you. I’ll be there in 9 days and my desire for freedom became conscious only one year ago.

If I can do it and so many other people can do it, so can you.

Take a look at hundreds of different topics and websites that “ordinary” people built with Site Build It. Many of these people are now working from home and earning great income from their home-based online business.

Check the above mentioned list of websites and you’ll see that you can be an expert in baby showers, parenting, taking care of older people, cooking, cleaning or anything else and you’ll have no problems making yourself useful to thousands of other people who are searching the internet.

Remember that the amount of money you earn is proportional to how useful you have made yourself to the humanity.

The power of the internet allows you to offer your knowledge and services to thousands of people and this will in return help you earn much more money.

b) There’s no need to be a genius to succeed.

There are certain, rare professions where you need to be very gifted to succeed.

High-level sport is one example. In athletics, for example, someone who wants to be a world class runner in the 100 m sprint, HAS to be born with the right genetic structure of muscles.

He or she needs to have an extremely high level of fast twitch muscles to be able to develop into a world class sprinter.

You need to be born with such genetic predisposition because it is not possible to significantly increase the percentage of fast twitch muscles through training.

Nuclear physics and complex mathematics are other examples. Unless you are genetically gifted in the field of math or science, you’ll never be able to completely comprehend difficult mathematical equations and become a successful physicist or mathematician.

But there are no special genetic requirements to succeed online and become financially free by working from home!

The only things you need are motivation and the ability to take action.

It will take some time to learn how the internet works and how you need to structure and build your website, but after that you just have to create useful content and spend some time promoting it.

If you choose the right solution and the right mentor to guide you through the first learning stages of how to build a successful website, you can be on your way to financial freedom in just a few months.

If, on the other hand, you keep falling to the thousands of get rich quick frauds that exist on the internet, you may soon lose your hard earned money and the belief that you can succeed online.

The mentor and the product that I recommend 100% to anyone who wants to build a successful and profitable website are Ken Evoy and his Site Build It.

I’ll tell you more about Ken and Site Build It in the step 4 of this 10 Steps to Freedom series, but feel free to follow the links above and learn more about how anyone can become financially free with SBI.

How I did it

In every one of these 10 Steps to Freedom, I’ll show you how I did it since examples are the best way to learn something new.

I have been a tennis coach for the last 14 years and have enjoyed my work.

The things that bothered me about working in a tennis club were that I had to work all the time otherwise I wouldn’t have enough money to live and or be able to have a vacation when I wanted.

I also believed that not being able to travel around the world is normal and that only some exceptionally lucky or brilliant people can do it. I was brainwashed.

But this uncomfortable feeling of not being free kept growing inside of me ever year.

In 2005, I started thinking about sharing my tennis knowledge through a website, and I hoped that maybe I could earn some additional income with the website.

I saw how other websites are earning passive income by selling ads or digital products and thought that this is a fantastic opportunity to earn money without having to work every day.

I didn’t think I could become financially free with the internet though.

But after only one year of discovering Site Build It and seeing how with only two ebooks that I was selling on my tennis website, I was earning a nice additional income, and I started to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I realized that if I keep working on my website and possibly create a few more, I could earn enough passive income to become financially free.

Here’s an example of how determined I was: when I bought my Acer notebook in January 2007 on which I am writing this article right now, I named it Freedom.

I already imagined myself having achieved financial freedom (I was earning around $1000 per month with my websites at that time) and needing only a notebook to work wherever I wanted and whenever I wanted.

There was no doubt in my mind that I couldn’t do it.

So this is how my desire and belief to become financially and personally free began, and in August 2007 I started this blog to help other people achieve that goal too.

I wasn’t free yet but I was already earning around $7000 per month through passive income with my websites and I knew that my contract in the tennis academy would end in December 2007. (And I actually am able to quit my job 1 month early!)

Just a few more words about belief since this can be the key whether you make it or not. You don’t really need to believe 100% that you can become free by working from home.

What you need is a small leap of faith. You need to have a desire to become free and enough belief to start your own website.

Once you build a few pages and realize that people can find your website through search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN even when you sleep , you’ll know that you can get even more visitors to your site by creating more pages.

And once you earn your first dollar, you’ll have proof that it can be done. Once you have real physical proof, you’ll be able to believe 100% that you can achieve financial freedom with your own home based online business.

Nothing will stop you after that. It will be just a matter of time.

Next: 5 Reasons to follow your passion instead of money