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Yes, teenagers can make passive income from Internet marketing. Here’s living proof:
Yes I’m a little biased, since she is my offspring. But still, you have to admit it’s impressive when a kid can start an online business and make it onto the speaking circuit by the age of 16, and have such composure in front of the camera.
I remember when I was a teenager trying out Junior Achievement, going to a couple of meetings, and thinking how incredibly lame it was. The meetings were more like Arts & Crafts class than anything resembling real entrepreneurship and business. I wish I had had the opportunities that Chloe had when I was her age.
Our school systems still don’t adequately prepare kids to be entrepreneurs and business people, as Chloe notes in one of her Huffington Post articles. But for those kids who are motivated, they can find the opportunities elsewhere.
My advice for those doting parents of a budding entrepreneur is to first read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad. It’s not all that well-written, but it has some really important concepts, ones that I instilled in my kids. Such as:
- Don’t work for a living, have money work for you
- Build assets that make money for you while you sleep
- Assets put money in your pocket month after month, liabilities take money out of your pocket month after month (thus a house you own and live in is a liability and NOT an asset)
And for those teens wondering where to start, first step is to pick something you’re passionate about. If it’s only about the money, it won’t be fun and you’ll lose your motivation when the going gets tough. For Chloe it was Neopets, but now she’s an “adult” (as she reminds me all the time) and not that into it anymore, so she’s delegating posting to a ghostwriter she found on oDesk. With her attention turning to film and to becoming a documentary director, my advice to her is to start a site or blog on that topic, perhaps more specifically on homegrown documentary videos by amateur filmmakers.
Bummer that I missed PubCon this week but I have just been traveling way too much lately. Speaking of traveling, I was in Indianapolis last week visiting the offices of Compendium Blogware. I got a demo of their hosted blog platform — including a look under the hood — and it’s pretty slick. There were features and functionality I had never seen before in blog software. One of the key differentiators, and the reason for the company’s name, is the “compending” capability that their solution does.
A compended blog is comprised of a collection of posts from other blogs, but all from within the same company. A company can have many employees blogging — customer service reps, salespeople, product developers etc. If a manufacturer, then dealers/distributors/retailers could join in on the fun too.
The appeal for companies who want to encourage employee blogging is that it’s dead simple to use, which is critical if you want wide adoption across the company. Here’s how it works: say that Bob from a Ford dealership blogs about the new Ford Mustang after he takes it for his first test drive. There are compended blogs for Mustangs, for sports cars, for pickups, etc. Without Bob having to think about it, his blog post gets compended automatically (using sophisticated content analysis algorithms) to the “Mustangs” and the “Sports Cars” blogs, but not the “Pickups” blog.
Blog posts that have been compended still maintain a canonical URL on the main blog, and that one canonical URL (of the permalink post page) is referenced consistently across all compended blogs on permalink post pages via a canonical link element (i.e. canonical tag). That eliminates duplicate copies of the permalink post page. The content of the post is nonetheless included on the compended blogs — in a fashion not dissimilar to post content being included on category pages, tag pages and date-based archives on WordPress blogs.
Here’s an example of two compended blogs (#1 and #2) and a post that is contained on both.
When considering duplicate content as it relates to SEO, bear in mind it’s not a penalty, but a filter, and that filter works query-time to favor the most relevant and authoritative result for the query entered. Given that, a particular compended blog will be most appropriate to the query, e.g. the query “2010 mustang sports car” would be most relevant to the Sports Cars blog. Note also the compended blogs are in subdirectories, not subdomains. The typical company will have a handful or perhaps dozens of compended blogs, large enterprises may have hundreds. It wouldn’t be unusual that a new post published on a WordPress blog and is in a couple categories and in a dozen tags would be duplicated (16 times including the date-based archives and home page, to be exact) more than a post on a typical Compendium network.
I’m in NYC for SMX East which starts tomorrow and I’m really looking forward it. But I’m also gearing up for Blog World Expo in a couple weeks. That’s because my daughter Chloe Spencer, the Neopets blogger, is going to be speaking there on a panel called “Are You Getting The Most Money Out Of Your Blog As You Can?” along with heavy hitters Dave Taylor, Tim Jones, and Chris Pirillo. The session is scheduled for Friday, October 16 at 11:30am.
Thinking about this panel reminded me of another panel that Chloe was a part of, also on the same topic, last year at DMA08. The session was called “Blog Monetization: From Soup to Nuts” and the heavy hitters that time were: Jeremy Schoemaker, Duane Forrester, Steve Spangler, and me. And thinking about that session reminded me that I had neglected to post the video of the session to this blog. Doh! So here it is…
The order of speakers was:
- me, founder of Netconcepts, co-author of The Art of SEO (coming out this month!)
- Chloe, teen blogger and AdSense entrepreneur, Huffington Post blogger/contributor
- Jeremy, a very successful Internet entrepreneur and Technorati top 100 blogger (Shoemoney.com is his blog)
- Duane, author of Making Money with Your Blog and the upcoming book Turn Clicks into Customers
- Steve, inventor, successful entrepreneur (founder of a science toy catalog company), science educator, keynote speaker, television personality, blogging CEO… Quite the Renaissance man!
The monetization approaches covered AdSense, affiliate, and much more. Lots of great tips, tricks, tactics, etc. If this video doesn’t help you make more money, I’ll give you a full refund! 
A blog can be an asset that benefits you personally. It can supplement your income, provide for your retirement, build up the kids’ college fund, or whatever. So I encourage you to study this video, because this could be your ticket — your ticket out of the rat race and into the world of passive income.
Here is my Powerpoint and Chloe’s.
Now go make some money! Or more specifically, go build yourself a passive income stream!
One way to bait for links is a blog contest. If you do the contest right, even the most un-sexy of products (like stationery) can become sexy, creating a buzz that can drive a torrent of search traffic to your virtual doorstep. Consider for example the contest we (Netconcepts) dreamed up for the overnight printer of stationery and business cards OvernightPrints.com that I mentioned a few posts back (“Hiring a Link Builder“). The contest was to design Internet celebrity and Technorati Top 100 blogger Jeremy Schoemaker’s business card and you could potentially win business cards for life.
Here’s the winner, which is an awesome business card IMO:
Let’s take a closer look at what made this blog contest a successful link building strategy:
- Come up with an impressive prize (or at least one that sounds impressive). In the above, the prize was a lifetime supply of business cards. A “lifetime supply” of anything sounds impressive. You can use the fine print to put some limits on it — like OvernightPrints.com did by capping it at 1000 business cards per year for a maximum of 20 years. That adds up to, well, peanuts.
- Get a partner with some name recognition who’s willing to promote your contest. If you’re a blogger, try to land a partner organization that you can piggyback off of their brand recognition. If you’re a brand, get a well-known blogger to partner with you. Jeremy Schoemaker was great; he has a massive following. Ride on the coattails of that partner’s brand by enlisting their help in spreading the word about the contest. They need to be willing to hawk your contest on their blog and in social media. Jeremy posted multiple blog posts (with good keyword-rich links) and a YouTube video and some tweets on Twitter, for example. (Thanks Shoe!)
- Promote the heck out of the contest yourself too. Don’t just rely on your partners to do it for you. With the above contest, we reached out to a bunch of design sites. And they took the bait. They loved the contest and promoted it to their community and linked to our contest page. What a great thing to add to your resume if you’re a designer, that you came up with the winning design of the business card for a famous blogger — out of over 400 entries no less!
- Make sure the contest entry pages lives on your site. Not on your partner’s. You want the link juice flowing directly to the site you are looking to promote in the search engines. As you might guess, the contest entry page was on OvernightPrints.com, not on Shoemoney.com or anywhere else.
- Keep it simple. There are numerous ways to run(ruin) a blog contest. If you want it to be a success, create a contest that is easy for users to participate in. People online are lazy and impatient — even if they aren’t like that in the real world (Something about being in front of the computer triggers it!). So, the more effort a contest requires, the lower the participation level. OvernightPrints.com kept it simple: “Design ShoeMoney’s business card”.. and win a lifetime supply of business cards.
- Make it relevant to your business and to your targeted search term. It wouldn’t have made any sense for OvernightPrints.com to run a contest where you write a letter to the President and win a trip to Washington DC. For Overnight Prints, their money term is “business cards”. Being on page 1 in Google for that term is worth big bucks to Overnight Prints. This contest moved them onto page 1, and in fact, onto the top half of page 1.
- Involve the community. Jeremy narrowed it down to 7 finalists and then asked his readers to help him decide. The participation factor is huge. It makes the blog’s readers much more invested in the outcome.
A good contest has synergy — it’s a win-win for all parties (blogger, brand, contestants, readers) and having the right partners means that overall the whole is greater than the sum of the parts (i.e. everyone does much better than if they had embarked on it individually). Yes this contest was a huge success for everybody involved. Of course OvernightPrints was the biggest winner of them all: they got relevant exposure, buzz, links, rankings and traffic. Use the above 7 step formula and hopefully you will have similar success yourself.
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