How to start the simplest 6 figure IM business

The desire for simplicity is the reason niche sites became so popular a few years back. The idea of creating a niche site, adding 10 articles, making money on Adsense and using a portion of the money to drive traffic through SEO was incredibly simple.

However, once you turned that into a large business and started managing a network of niche sites and Google started rolling out EMD and niche site targeted updates, the simplicity faded.

The thing is, this isn't even that simple, the attractive part is that you could make money quickly.

Simplicity depends on the person and the existing skills they have. Starting an authority site and adding content each day probably sounds pretty simple for most veteran marketers, yet for some of the new guys, this can be a daunting task.

uuummmm....
in my opinion the title of the post does not suite the post

Terrific thread, gjabiz, and thanks for the offline thread heads-up.

This is one of those threads that I'd likely jump on when I was close to retirement and feel completely at ease when talking about specifics. Touch wood, however, I'm a long way from retirement and therefore disinclined to mention anything but generalizations, as opposed to specific business models. I dare say I won't be alone. Those of us in possession of valuable information are unlikely to do anything but keep it to ourselves or, in rare cases, put a price on it. Public forums have a lovely habit of killing profit margins, just as much as they can ignite them.

A general system, then: Passive Income Growth.

Never believe anyone who tells you passive income is a myth. Yes, disreputable marketers use the notion of passive income to sell products, but this in no way detracts from the truth of its existence. I could probably give you a hundred different sources of it. Instead, consider what would happen if you asked a video marketer, with 10,000 videos spread across the major video sharing platforms, if he believes in passive income. Ask him if he has to continue working to pay the bills or if he can take a vacation for 3 months and probably return to work earning more money each day than he did prior to hitting the beaches in Miami. To him, passive traffic and thus passive income is very real. The misconception is that passive traffic can last forever and that it takes very little effort to set up. Neither of course are true; except in the case of the latter, which is rarely true.

Key Points:

1. Passive income is real.
2. Passive income never lasts.
3. Passive income is rarely easy to set up.

The debate: if we agree that passive income cannot last, then we might also say, and be somewhat right in doing so, that only semi-passive income exists, because to motivate continued earning we might be compelled to intervene to extend that earning by doing something. The key word here is "might." The fact is, some passive income models cannot be touched and thus extended, unless we are scaling them, and even when passive income systems can be extended, we actually don't have to extend them. With the video marketing model in mind, for instance, when the work has been done expertly by the video marketer, he can easily choose not to add more videos or do any further work (ranking, for instance) on his existing videos to see continued earnings. And in many cases, he actually will never need to touch his system. It will simply plateau for years. Eventual income decline might be some years in the future.

The trick to setting up a good passive income model relies on 3 factors:

1. The system that generates traffic should not decline in volume or quality for a long time.

2. The means of monetization should be something that is evergreen in nature and thus unlikely to go out of fashion for a long time.

3. To earn money, the system should require no involvement from the marketer once he has setup and made efficient his system.

Think of it like this.

What if you wanted to build a big hill in your back garden? Silly, I know, but bear with me - hey, I said bear not bare, put those undies back on!

You get up every morning and you walk out into the back garden, taking sips from your steaming cup of coffee, and with your free hand you take a garden trowel, scoop up some dirt and plonk it on the mound of earth. One day it will be a hill, you tell yourself.

But what happens if your particular back garden is prone to high gusts of wind? This is what happens. Every day, after you go back inside your home, some of the earth you tossed on the mound gets blown to the four corners of the Earth. Some days, even more than that is blown away. It can even lead to a situation of diminishing returns, where you're putting in the extra effort to add more mud and yet more than that is blown away.

You will never, in short, have a big hill. One day, if you stop working on it, you may never even have a hill.

Now think about that wind. Problem, isn't it? But what if there was no wind? Or at least very little wind? Nothing to stop the growth of your hill? Before long you'd have a hill out back that would be towering over your house. Granted, the neighbours might be somewhat peeved, but hey, you'd have your hill. Cool beans.

The above scenario? When it comes to building passive income, always remember the hill and the wind, where, for you, the hill is your passive income system and the wind represents the elements that diminish the effectiveness of that system.

The trick is to setup a system that you can add to each day without fear of losing some of the work you did yesterday. The longer you can go without losing the efforts of your past work, the better the passive income system.

- Tom

Product creation is probably the easiest way for me to make 6, Figures. I've coached 8/8 students and they all have 6-Figure businesses now as well.

It's a high barrier to entry in IM, but once you get there. It's probably the easiest to scale