Online and passive money (preferably both at the same time) are all the rage today and money people will ask “Is it real or a scam?” or “Is it too late to get started today?“
The answers to these questions are “Yes, it’s real!” and “No, it’s not. In fact, one might argue it’s even better today than it was a couple years ago.“
Defining “Rich“
Ask 10 people to tell you what the term “rich” means to them and you’ll end up with 11 different definitions.
Depending on where in the world you live or how you grew up, your idea of being “rich” will change. Just to be clear, for the scope of this article we’ll define rich in the financial sense (not denying there are other interpretations but they’re not really relevant here).
Let’s agree on objective terms here, there are different ways to define it, even when we agree to use actual numbers. Do you think being rich is a certain net worth? Or is it buying power instead? Is it a certain amount of monthly cash flow? And if so, does it make a difference it if’s active or passive?
Let’s agree on a certain number most people will accept and in case you don’t, we’ll give you the formula along the way so you can make your own calculations.
Let’s start with monthly cash flow, I like to use it instead of net worth because the goal of your riches is to cover your monthly expenses so let’s start with getting a cash flow higher than your expenses.
You might be “well off” in most places with 5,000 or 10,000 dollars or even just 1,000 in some places outside of the west but to be truly rich we’ll set the bar at 25,000 per month, which equates to 300,000 per year.
You might think that’s an arbitrary number but it actually works out quite well. Since on this website, we mostly talk about online businesses and content sites in particular, these have a multiple of about 40x your monthly recurring revenue, equating exactly to one million dollars.
The Road To Riches
Now we have our goal, let’s reverse engineer the formula and look into how we can get there in practice using a blog or content site.
According to Ezoic, the average niche site earns about $25 per thousand visitors (or epmv) in ad income.
So to get to 25,000 per month, the math is easy. You just need to get a thousand times a thousand or one million (gotta love these round numbers).
But it gets better; because you’re not limited to ads for monetizing your website, you can also do affiliate marketing or create your own (digital or physical) products.
If you can equal your ad income by affiliate income (and some sites easily get 5x or 10x their ad income in affiliate income), you would cut the number of required visitors in half.
While a million (or even half of that) visitors might sound daunting at first, there’s many websites out there you’ve never heard of that do way more than that.
Action Plan
To get to that million pageviews, you can start with this action plan:
- Find a niche that interests you or you know a lot about (preferably both)
- Start with a small sub-niche in that niche (we’ll broaden it later on)
- Use Google auto suggest to find the first 30 articles in your sub-niche
- Write those 30 articles
- Analyze your search console to see which articles rank best and write more about them
- Start with ads, then rinse and repeat
- Once you’re at 100+ articles, look to broaden the niche and get into affiliate marketing
- At 500+ or 1,000+ articles you should be an authority and be able to rank on every topic in your original niche; consider building your own products (digital or physical)
That’s the main outline. No, it’s not an exact blueprint that you can follow step by step, but these are the principles that have worked for money people in achieving true riches and financial independence. It’s hard work and will take a while to start seeing results (it’s like planting a seed) but at some point, your niche site will really start growing.
Now this website is a true online business generating active income, but the be truly independent you’ll need to convert it to passive income following the Layers of Wealth.
