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Tomaz has talked a lot about doing something you’re passionate about and the Site Build It! Action Guide emphasizes this as well. Without passion you will not keep going when you aren’t seeing results in the first 3, 6 or even 12 months.

Building a real business takes a lot of hard work, so it’s essential that you find something you love. If money didn’t exist, what would you do? There are no limits, only those that we impose on ourselves.

For example, you can have multiple passions, why not? I recently discovered that I am extremely passionate about helping people grow both spiritually and financially.

We all have something that we love doing and something that we burn for. Using that and turning it into a business will take you a long way.

4 Things That Will Separate You from the Crowd

When you’re passionate you won’t have trouble going the extra mile for your visitors, customers or clients. A few things I’ve noticed from people that are passionate are:

Care. When you like what you’re doing you’ll naturally contact your visitors and start a discussion. You never know where this may lead. It’s easy to think that talking to a visitor doesn’t have value, but they might know someone who knows someone that will then lead to a business opportunity.

Authenticity. Keeping it real is something that will become necessary in the years to come. With social media, blogs and all of these tools, word of mouth is becoming more and more powerful. If you aren’t taking care of your visitors and being authentic, your brand will go down the toilet.

Networking. This goes hand in hand with caring. If you want to jumpstart your progress, you have to get out there and network, both online and offline. If you can’t do offline, then go online and comment on blogs, use twitter, facebook and participate in the forums in your niche.

Hard work. Ultimately it all comes down to hard work. But when you’re doing what you’re passionate about, work is play and it isn’t really hard work. It’s just you having fun while building your business. Writing content, building links, brainstorming and innovating comes easily when you’re following your passion and not just doing it for the money.

The Time to Act is Now

Never has there been more opportunity than there is now. The cost of entry is low. You can connect with like-minded people and create your own community. It takes work, but it is worth it. If you’re working a 9-5 job, keep at it, but start putting out content on your passion when you’re home.

Using the power of passion to build your own business isn’t complex, it just takes work. Just doing 15 minutes a day will produce big results in the long-run. There are many resources out there that will help you get started. Site Build It! is excellent, and a great starting point.

Ultimately it is up to you to do your research, but do not get hung up on the tools. Find something that is endorsed by someone you respect and start taking action.

I was planning a niche website and started to check the best domains related to it on http://whois.domaintools.com.

Best domains are short, catchy and include the main keyword or a synonym.

For example, if you were planning a site which would share lots of tennis tips, you’d want to check if tennistips.com, tennistips.net, tennis-tips.com and similar domains are still available.

I checked about 7 or 8 domains, used synonyms that tried to say the same thing using other keywords when I came across a domain that was for sale:

I followed the link and ended up on a site that specializes in buying and selling domain names. There was a form to complete:

I simply introduced myself and asked the price of the domain name.

I received an email a day later:

“Hello,

Please contact us with any questions.”

I then checked the domain more thoroughly using archive.org and noticed that there hasn’t been any content on it since 2004. The domain was actually first registered in 1998.

This is the note that I sent back:

“Hi,

Best regards,
Tomaz Mencinger”

There’s some psychology here at works, so let me explain: since I noticed that the domain hasn’t had any content on it for 5 years, that meant that someone was not successful in selling it.

Maybe they asked too much for it in the beginning, in any case $3000 was too much now too.

$1000 is about the maximum I would be willing to pay for a domain without content – because it is a 2 word domain, has keywords with lots of demand and is quite old.

I also emphasized that they can pass my offer, which would mean that they would continue to be unsuccessful in selling that domain.

I also stroked their ego a little bit saying that they are probably very good at what they do and that I was willing to follow their lead – and that I wouldn’t complicate with my ideas of how to pay and transfer the domain.

This is the reply I received the next day:

“Hello,

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So that was about it. I paid using paypal through 2checkout.com, and received  the access to the domain in the next email about 2 hours later.

I transferred the domain to bluehost.com where I also host this blog and some of my other sites.

By the way, I really recommend bluehost.com (aff. link) for hosting and domain management as they offer payment with paypal and have lots of video tutorials (including how to transfer domains).

I’ve never had any problems with them and the domain manager and hosting accounts are very easy to understand and manage.

In summary, I wanted to show you how to find a good domain name and how to bargain. Of course, if you’re not willing to walk away from the deal, then you don’t have the real power in negotiating.

For my purposes, that domain name was not so critical and I could have registered a similar domain for $10 per year.

But since I can afford it and the domain keywords really explain in 2 words what the site is about (and those two keywords also have lots of demand and I’ll probably rank quite high in Google for that search term in about a year or so), I made my offer.

I’ll build this site with WordPress but I’ll find a theme that looks like a website and not like a blog. The site will be built with SBI principles and I will keep you posted on its progress.

But what exactly is »good« content?

People often ask me; how many words should I write? Is 300 words enough? Do I need to add pictures too? How about videos? And so on…

All these questions are based on the wrong type of thinking when it comes to success. That’s because in the back of your mind is this thinking: what is the least amount of work that I need to do to earn money?

Read that sentence a few times and think logically whether this type of thinking will get you successful (in any field).

I don’t think so.

In other words, you’re looking for shortcuts. Well, then success will take a shortcut around you too…

So what’s a good content page then? Here’s my guideline:

It’s a page that I am PROUD of.

I look with a critical eye at what I have written and then I wonder whether I’ll be proud to put that on MY site. (This goes mainly for my tennis site – or in your case, your expertise or passion site)

My site is a reflection of me.

It shows my expertise, my attention to detail and how much work I put into something that interests me. A future client who wishes to have tennis or mental coaching can see whether I know something and whether I will work hard towards our common goal.

I also wonder whether I would be proud to show my page to other tennis coaches and players and whether that page would impress them, give them answers to their questions and whether they would recommend it to someone else too.

I also wonder whether that page belongs at LEAST to the top 10 of pages on this topic on the internet, but usually I aim higher – top 5 pages on that subject.

So the questions to ask to tell whether you have a good content page are:
1.    Is your page written so well that it BELONGS into top 5 of ALL pages on the internet on the topic?
2.    Are you proud of what you have written?
3.    Can you proudly show your page to fellow experts in your field and receive praise for what you have written?
4.    Did you give your best sharing your knowledge or did you take shortcuts?

You may also build websites on topics that you don’t know much about and therefore you hire writers to work for you. You might say that what they write is out of your control.

That’s a lame excuse. You can ask them very specifically to write what you want by giving them very clear instructions. This of course takes time and effort and it will not come naturally to you if you’re constantly thinking of shortcuts.

I have some excellent pages on my vacuum site that I am proud of which I did not write. But I gave the writer very specific instructions on which vacuums to review, how to review them, how I wish the formatting to look and I sent the article back twice before accepting it.

Again, you can ask yourself whether you’re proud of having this page on YOUR site which hundreds or thousands of people see.

Do you see only traffic stats or are you aware that these represent real people looking for real and useful information online?

Do you really want to share something useful and help these people (and earn money at the same time) or do you egoistically just want to earn money and not care whether people got anything useful from your site or not?

Your success online is not just based on picking the right keywords, writing articles and getting links.

It’s the kind of thinking explained in this article that that will set you apart from those who get 100 visitors per day after a year or more and still keep asking questions. And it’s this kind of thinking that needs to be in the back of your mind when writing pages and getting links.

Set high standards and you will get high rewards…

P.S. One more thing to keep in mind: let’s say that your »shortcut strategy« works and you actually managed to earn some good money online by creating lots of crappy sites that all together bring in some good money.

Are you REALLY happy now? Are you fulfilled? Are you doing good service to other people or is it just about you, you, you?

And is that really happiness? Think about it and what path you want to take with your online business and your life…

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There are tools to automate most processes on twitter that will take some time to set
them up but these tools will reduce your time on Twitter to several minutes a day.

Twitter is also a great way to make yourself and your web presence more visible to a
broader audience in your niche, helps you find link exchange opportunities, and get to know other interesting people.

Every time you “tweet” (send a message of a 140 characters) on twitter you will get an
average response (a user clicking on a link in your tweet) of about 2% or 2 clicks per
100. These numbers may be slightly different for you.

Sign Up With Twitter

Sign up with Twitter @ http://twitter.com/

-Use a user name that includes your niche keyword preferably.

-click settings and give yourself a name. I used mydomain.com

-More Info URL: URL to your website, blog or other site.

-One Line Bio: be descriptive and interesting (you only have 140 characters)

-Location: this should be obvious

-Click on the pictures tab and upload a picture of your pretty self preferably.

-Click the design tab and play around with it a little bit. Upload a background image if
you like. Make it look a little different than standard look.

-Click the notices tab. Uncheck it all if you do not want emails send to your email
account. I unchecked it all since I don’t need more emails. I have enough of those
already.

Are you happy with the look of it?
If not you can come back later and change it.

-Click the Home tab at the top of the page.
On the right hand side do a little search for your niche and follow a few users. A few
will do for now.

Automate The “follow” Process

Go to http://www.twollo.com/ and Login with your Twitter username and password.

Once you are signed in you will see a box which reads “follow”…leave that.
The “up to” drop down menu – set that to “up to 500″. (It’s “up to” you)

In the box that reads: Twitterers talking about: Enter your niche keyword. Click Add.

You can add as many keywords as you want. One at a time (can be more than 1 word).
You will figure this out later as you get familiar with this.

Test It
Click on “Quick Run”next to your keyword.
This will add a few followings to you Twitter account.

Twollo will periodically find Twitter users with the keywords you are adding.

Add more keywords later if you want to grow your Twitter account faster.

Wait a day or so and see what it does for you. Don’t go crazy with this in the beginning.
The beauty is that Twollo will find users to follow for you which tweet about your
keyword/s.

No manual work to find Twitter users to follow, unless you want to.

You can always find people to follow by going to http://search.twitter.com/ or use the
search function on twitter.

Bulk Follow and Unfollow

When you have too many people that don’t follow you, you do not have to unfollow them manually anymore. Every 2 days or so you can go to: http://www.dossy.org/twitter/karma/

Sign in with your Twitter ID and password. Click on Whack (I didn’t pick that name).

Twitter Karma will download all your followers and followings from Twitter. Be patient.
This may take a while.

The larger your twitter “followship” the longer it will take. It’s worth the wait and it’s FREE.

This would take you forever manually especially when your Twitter account has many
followers.

Where it says Show: drop down menu. Choose “only following”. Now, this will show you the people who you are “following only”. You can choose one by one or just bulk unfollow the checked.

Do the same with “only Followers” which means the ones that you have not followed yet. I just check them all and bulk follow.

I don’t want my Twitter account to look too unbalanced. If people don’t follow you after a couple of days, they probably won’t follow
you.

Automate Your Tweets

Sign in with your Twitter username and password @ http://www.tweetlater.com

Check: Automatically send a welcome message to new followers.

My message goes like this:
Thanks for your follow! I will make sure to follow you back. Find out more about me on my website: http://www.paradise-pattaya.com/

Check: Automatically follow people (new followers) who follow me from this point
forward.

Check: if you select this option, TweetLater will automatically unfollow those folks who
unfollow you. To protect you from any system glitches, we will never unfollow more than ten people in one single go.

Don’t check the email option unless you love hundreds of emails because tweetlater will send an email to your email account every time someone follows you.

Click save.

On top click on “Tweets”, then on “New Tweets”.

Tweet: here you write your tweet 140 characters. I usually check Save As Draft: Save
this tweet text as a draft that can be re-used later.

That way you can find the same tweet for later re-use. Here you can also schedule your tweets to be “tweeted” at a later point in time. This is a very useful automation.

***Sidebar***
Occasionally Tweet something that is not just focused on your site. Talk to someone from your twitter account. Maybe upload an image to twitpic. I get traffic from http://twitpic.com/ as well since they allow you to have a link to your web site in your
account.

You will have a lot of online marketers as followers. Let them market what they want. You only see them in your twitter “timeline” anyways and they may sometimes Re-tweet your tweets. Each person only sees the tweets of the person he/she follows anyways.

There is no way that you can read everything (or want to read) what others “tweet” about when you have many followers. People can connect with you via “direct messages” or by replying to your Tweets.

Most people who are interested in your tweets usually only follow a limited numbers of
“Twitterers” (a new vocabulary here). These people will see your tweets and maybe click on them today or tomorrow.
***Sidebar***

My friend told me a few days ago that he was delaying his decision to finally start an online business because he felt that the competition is too tough. He had an idea for a niche and typed a few keywords into Google to see who was his main competition.

The top spots were taken by about.com, consumersearch.com and other massive websites. Not only have these website pagerank 6, 7 or 8 and Alexa rating below 10,000, there are also very skilled writers posting their articles.

“How I am going to beat them? Impossible.”

Here are 3 reasons why this fear is empty:

They dominate only for a few keywords. These sites are optimized for a few keywords and they do rank highly for them. But let me tell you this: my tennis website was found for 7825 different keywords in October of 2008.

I have optimized the site for maybe 100 keywords and the rest just happened. It’s the so called long tail and it brings a LOT of traffic.

Pagerank isn’t everything. I have a website with pagerank 3 that keeps changing the #1 spot with a website with pagerank 5. My site is themed around a certain product and the competing site is not. Google is smart enough to recognize the specialized topic of my site and push it higher in the rankings.

Google cannot tell whether your article is helpful or not. For example this blog has plenty of very good articles (I hope so) but it receives only 50 daily visitors. But one of my other sites has had all articles written by a hired writer who researched the web and created new articles based on already available information on the web.

Those articles mean nothing new and are not written by an expert, but that site still receives over 2500 visitors per day.

You don’t have to write like a Pullitzer prize journalist in order to start an online business that earns good money. Success in any field is based on 5% talent and 95% hard work.

Put in the hard work of writing 200 keyword optimized solid (not perfect) articles and you’ll be rewarded with very nice traffic figures from Google, Yahoo and other sources. Nice traffic will also bring nice earnings.

You’ll also learn tons of stuff about starting an online business and you’ll become more experienced and will make fewer and fewer mistakes. If you wait for that perfect moment to start, there will always be something to distract you and delay your decision.

If you have any other fears or doubts about starting your online business, share them in the comments below and my readers and I will do our best to remove those nagging fears and help you start your journey towards financial and personal freedom.

Q: Hi Tomaz,

I’m in the middle of day 2 progress with SBI.

I’m an avid reader of your blog. About developing a site concept, learning from SBI, one need brain and motivation to make things work. What keeps me wondering is, I read from your blog about how you built your vacuum site, when you have no deep knowledge about vacuum cleaner, but you hired article writing services to develop your content, and it now works like a charm.

I’ve bought one of Dr Andy’s niche package, a couple of months ago. The niche is about ‘”…..’. I have no knowledge at all about this niche. Do you think it may work well for me if I hire someone else to develop content, as you did with your niche on vacuum cleaner?

In other words, I have no brain nor motivation in developing an ……-niched site, but to think of I can outsource the content to third party, while it seems simple enough with less work in writing my own content, developing this site may cost substantially higher than budgeted.

A: My vacuum site was first an experiment to make a little bit more money. That was my motivation.

But it turned out to be a great earner. Eventually I saw the light at the end of the tunnel – I could see that I can become free from a job if I make the vacuum site dominate the niche.

So my motivation is freedom and there’s nothing stronger than that for me. Money is just the tool…

Yes, the price for outsourcing is quite high and I did it when I earned enough money with my tennis site. And that’s also my suggestion; stay in the + (positive).

Earn money and invest part of that money in content writing or something else. Don’t go into – (negative) because then you become anxious and impatient and make mistakes or look for shortcuts where there aren’t any.

If you upload 3 articles per week, that’s 12 per month and each costs $8 your cost will be $100 per month. If your first site makes that much, then you can outsource 12 articles per month…

Achieving financial freedom by working from home with an online business can take just 2 simple steps if you take a look at the big picture.

Note that simple does not necessarily mean easy.

Working from home and pursuing financial freedom with an online business can become simple after a while, but it still takes effort and commitment, which most people don’t find easy.

(Remember that simple is the opposite of complicated.)

Your final goal is to create one or more successful websites which rank high in search engines for the in-demand keywords that people use when looking for information online.

This will ensure a constant flow of visitors, which you can then convert into sales or clicks that will show up as a monthly check sent from Google, Chitika or another provider.

And in order to rank high, your site must have lots of quality content and incoming links from other websites which influence the ranking the most.

The two steps to achieve your goal, then, are:

1. Create lots of quality content.

2. Get external links pointing (links from other websites) to the content.

That’s it.

That’s the big picture of getting free search engine traffic night and day.

It’s easy to get lost in the massive amount of information available on the Web. Thousands of blogs and websites produce new articles and tips, trying to add more content to their websites and earn more money converting readers into sales.

Instead of looking for more information on HOW to achieve financial freedom working from home, you need to focus on DOING the most effective actions that will bring you the best results.

What you need is a strategy for bulding content and a strategy for building links.

3 Strategies Of Creating Quality Content

People online look for solutions, help, information, products to buy and so on. So your focus needs to be on providing what people look for.

You can learn more about creating quality content in one of my previous posts, but now let’s focus more on 3 effective strategies for writing useful articles.

a) Set up a schedule

One way to set up a schedule is to first do keyword research based on your chosen market niche and then decide how often you want to add a new article (based on a keyword) to your website.

My strategy for the last year was to:

• Build a home page: 10 to 15 main pages, with each page having 4-5 related articles. This makes a website with 40 to 60 pages.
• Add 2 new articles per week until the website reaches 100 pages.
• Add one article per week from then on.

For the website that is my main passion, I wrote the articles myself. For other websites, I outsourced them, mostly through Need An Article.

b) Write based on daily experiences

If you follow your passion when choosing your niche, then this strategy works really well.

In my case, I coached tennis on- and off-court, and every day something would come up that I needed to explain to the player(s).

So later I would write an article about that topic. This was (and still is) an inexhaustible source of ideas for my tennis website and blog.

Another source of ideas for the content are questions that people ask me through my online form. The content that I write based on those inquiries is of course laser-targeted and extremely useful to readers of the website.

c) Write based on news and events in your industry

There are many blogs related to financial freedom and working from home that follow this strategy.

You can check their RSS feeds and main news websites, and then write your own view of what you think about that topic.

This is another inexhaustible source of ideas—although I don’t like it that much since you rarely add something original to the Internet.

A Scheduled Link-Building Strategy

Building quality links to your site is crucial to your site’s success.

You can find some link-building strategies in my previous posts, but let’s try and break down the link-building into manageable time and task parts.

When you first start writing for your website or blog, you need to create some quality content before you look for links.

In the case of blogs, this step can be somewhat shortened since social bookmarking sites and other blogs don’t mind linking to a “young” blog if the post is very good.

But when building a large-content website that will enable you to work from home and eventually achieve financial freedom, you need to build at least 30-50 pages of good content before you go hunting for links.

Here’s a link-building strategy with a schedule that I often use:

a) Build 40 to 60 pages first (this is the first step in building content, as mentioned above), and then submit your site to major directories or blog directories. You can find the major directories I use in this post and blog directories in this one.

b) Submit 2 original or rewritten articles every week to ezinearticles.com targeting your homepage and one main page with the anchor text links from the resource box. Do this until you get links to all your main pages. After that, submit one article per month (or every 2 weeks) targeting one or two internal pages of your website.

c) Schedule 1 to 2 hours once a week to find reciprocal link partners.

d) If you have a blog, schedule 1 hour once a week to comment only on do-follow blogs. (those who pass pagerank)

e) Comment daily on all types of blogs (no-follow and do-follow) if you find interesting posts.

f) Once a week review your articles written in the past week and submit the best ones to social bookmarking sites.

g) When you have some free time, explore other ways of building links, like creating a Squidoo lens, posting in forums with a signature and so on.

How To Ensure A Long Term Motivation

Before you rush to implement these content and link building strategies, I’d like to share one tip I learned from Anthony Robbins.

Where most people eventually fail is when they create a to-do list. A to-do list sooner or later makes you feel that you HAVE TO do something, and this creates resistance.

Eventually you stop doing what you set out to do in the first place. The desire to be free from HAVE-TOs is so strong that we resist and fight even ourselves when we create a “have to-do” list.

That’s why you need to create a WHY list.

Why are you building links? What will you achieve with them? If it’s achieving financial freedom by working from home, then what’s so good about it?

Once you dig deep and find the true reasons why you are doing what you are doing, you’ll create a powerful and long-lasting motivation to drive you to complete sometimes boring and mundane tasks.

This “Financial Freedom Working From Home In 2 Simple Steps” technique is basically a to-do list which, if followed as outlined above, will undoubtedly bring you online success.

What you need to do next is to take some time and discover your WHYs. Before you even sit down at your computer, know and feel your WHYs.

Why are you pursuing financial freedom? What are the benefits of working from home?

Find your own personal reasons, and the above 2 steps of creating content and building links will not become something that you HAVE to do (and resist doing).

Rather, they will be something you can’t wait to start doing every day.