In this video I want to show you how I make money online by answering questions and how this may be something you can do as well to generate passive income on the side.
0:00 – Introduction
1:30 – Inspiration for this strategy
2:24 – The basic strategy
2:50 – 1. Finding Unanswered Questions
5:55 – How to find unanswered questions
8:39 – 2. Set up a website and write articles that answer those questions
10:35 – 3. Make videos to answer those questions
11:59 – 4. Repeat the process
12:57 – Challenges with making money online this way
17:49 – Give us a thumbs up if you like this
Recommended Videos:
How I Achieved Financial Freedom at 28 With Online Passive Income
Marcus Sheridan’s Video (2013)
Transcription:
Ryan 0:00
in this video i want to show you how i make money online by answering questions so rather than talking about property i actually want to talk about my online media business how i make money through it simply by answering people’s questions and how this is maybe something that you could do as well to generate some passive income and extra income on the side so if that’s something that you’re interested in listen along and i’ll show you exactly how i do it and how you can do it too dave this question asking me if i’d share a bit more about my experience and my story how did i start they understand is not properly relevant but something that the audience may be interested in since you’ve got so much free time at home why not start an online business or content creation so i’m not going to go into my backstory in this video because i did talk about all my backstory in this long video on how i achieve financial freedom at 28 with online passive income so i’ll link up to that down below or you can go to onproperty com.au forward slash 795 to see the show notes for this episode but i talked about it in detail there and you can see there how i set things up i achieved what i call pseudo financial freedom so i didn’t have to work for a couple of years there because my business was earning me enough money but it wasn’t a long term financial freedom that you get through property so in this video i’m going to talk about how i did that how i make money online by answering questions called they ask you answer now this idea in this concept is taken from a bunch of different sources but a massive inspiration for me is this talk by marcus sheridan which was done back in 2013 and he ran a pool company and during the financial crisis of 2008 obviously sales for his pork company went down dramatically and in order to get more exposure and get more interest in his company he took all the questions that people had ever asked about pools and he started writing blog posts on them eventually grow grew his website and pool company to be the most visited pool website in the world i think and so the ideas shared in this talk again i’ll link that down below if they asked you answer is just phenomenal and kind of what i built my business off as well as a bunch of other diet ideas that i’ll talk about throughout this video so the strategy behind it is really quite simple is you find on answer questions you go ahead and set up a website and you write articles to answer them you or you make videos to answer them and then you go ahead and repeat that and then you can make money from that by using affiliate links or by doing advertising on those so let’s go ahead and look through that one at a time finding unanswered questions so if we go to our handy friend google i’m going to type in a bunch of questions that someone might write and we’re going to see that i actually rank for a bunch of days so something that’s related to onproperty is how to find positive cash flow property so we go ahead and search for that you can see that i’ve answered this question on property how to find positive cash flow suburbs i think this article was written years and years ago so you got onproperty as the number one result you’ve also got onproperty as the number two result for the 12 hot places to find positive cash flow property which was october a hit in 2013 so definitely probably needs to be updated and you can also see here a bunch of videos obviously i’ve covered this topic a lot and positive cash flow is kind of my specialty so you can say 1234567 of the 10 videos shown here are actually on property videos and my ones another one is i started a website on becoming carbon positive or carbon neutral and i just thought about questions this is before i really knew how to do research to find unanswered questions but basically i thought okay how long do led lights take to pay themselves off or pay for themselves you know survive replace my lights with
led lights how long are they actually going to take in reduced electricity costs in order to cover the extra costs of the led lights and you can see that if you search this search volume for that is zero but you can see that i come up first here and there’s a bunch of other websites as well but if you go ahead and click on this then you can see that i’ve done an article where i look at you know how much the regular bytes how much the regular lights cost to run looked at the wattage looked at the cost of electricity and how much do led lights take and then compare them and then basically went through and looked at if you’re only using them for hours a day how long do they take to pay off if you’re using them all day every day how long do they take to pay off and it was really actually quite startling that most most of these were paid off well within a year and some of them paid for themselves within about a month i even went as far as to see how many co2 emissions can you save from using led lights so basically i had this question and i went ahead and i answered it to the best of my ability and i probably went over the top here with this and answering it for how much money this one article makes me but you can also see here that we’ve got some advertising on the website as well which is how i make money so that’s it we’re going to find out unanswered questions and that is videos in amongst themselves but one of the easiest ways to find them is if we go back to google how long did led lights take to pay for themselves then google actually suggest a bunch of questions down here how much the led lights save per month do led bulbs really save you money so these are all questions that people are asking is it cheaper to leave led lights on and then what you can do is you can read through this and you can see the answer and if it’s a good answer then maybe it’s not worth writing them out you can also open up the search term and see okay what if people have people actually answered this question is it cheaper to leave the led lights on so this one has answered or is it cheaper to leave a room light on but that’s from chora which is kind of like forums people asking questions so generally it’s not a dedicated article to that and then we’ve got one when to turn off your lights should you turn off your lights when you leave the room saving energy tips well you can see how much money you can save by turning off the lights what you can see here is that no one’s actually written an article specifically for this question so no one’s actually said is it cheaper to leave led lights on if i’m googling that and asking that i want a website to come up that has written an article detailing whether or not it’s cheaper to leave led lights on when i should leave them on when i shouldn’t leave them on so if i wrote an article on is it cheaper to leave led lights on i can almost guarantee you that i would probably rank definitely on the first page for this but i would probably get here this little snippet here that is shown i could almost yeah guaranteed to do that given just the minimum competition that is here and so it’s about finding those sorts of questions ideally you want to find ones that says volumes zero that’s not necessarily the case because if google’s suggesting it then there’s probably some volume of that but what you can do is also look down the bottom here at the related keywords is it better to leave led lights on benefits or turning off lights how much electricity electricity is wasted by leaving lights on so there’s a lot of different questions and suggestions that google does so it’s about finding a niche and it’s about finding a niche that has all these questions that haven’t been answered i use a tool called w ms everywhere to give me the search volume and you can see here turning off lights facts benefits or turning off lights how much electricity is wasted by leaving lights on you can see that there’s about 50 searches a month these are never completely accurate but it just kind of gives you an idea of what may have search volume and what may not so if i haven’t lost you
there in all the details you want to find those unanswered questions step number two is to set up a website and to write articles that actually answer those questions so as we saw i had the website carbon positive life.com this is one i started years ago and i think i only ever wrote like 15 articles on this most of these articles get hardly any traffic there’s a couple on there that get a couple 100 views per month where people come to them but i started this website i wrote these articles and now this website generates some passive income for me i haven’t touched it in years it’s something that i would like to go back to at a later date because this sort of carbon neutral carbon positive living is something that i’m passionate about but i was able to set up this website again that could be a whole nother video in and of itself of how to actually set up the website i do i had previously used bluehost in the past to set up the hosting for my website as well as godaddy to buy the domain name so buy the.com so this is carbon positive life.com so i would buy the domain name and then i use bluehost to set up my website and run it on wordpress if you want more details into exactly how to do that let me know in the comment section down below and i can go to do that but if you go to onproperty com au forward slash bluehost then you can get a discount on that and that is an affiliate link so if you go through that it will save you money but i’ll also get a commission for that if you do that links will be in the description as well for that or you can go to onproperty com.au forward slash bluehost so you set up the website and then you go ahead and you write articles to answer those questions and that is where the bulk of my time is spent i sit here in this room i find these questions and i spend a lot of my time sitting here answering questions that you don’t even know that people have but i’ve done the research and people have asked them alternatively you can make videos to answer them as well so as you saw when we search for how to find positive cash flow properties there was videos on that or if you go ahead and you search for barefoot investor bank accounts explained so barefoot investor has a really great book on personal finance and he talks about how to set up your bank accounts but it gives them all really interesting names like the mojo account the smile account the fire hydrant and it can get quite confusing for people and reading this book i thought this is really great but i can see that this is going to be confusing for people so i made a video with barefoot investor bank accounts and buckets explained and if you go ahead and look at this video you can see it’s got nearly 75,000 views and that was made about two years ago so being a pretty popular thing that people have looked for is to actually get this explain so i’ve made the video here for this i think i linked to the img offer as well as a link to the book which are affiliate links and then obviously make some money in youtube advertising as well and so rather than writing an article i made a video about it and then the next step is to go ahead and repeat that so you can do one question you can do two questions three questions four questions up to you know 100 1000 as many as you can potentially do and the more questions that you answer then the more traffic that you make and i could you know go through so many details about how to create authority on your website so that google trusts you so that you rank faster and stuff like that but basically that that’s what i do is that i find these questions that people have i go ahead and i answer them better than anyone else on the internet or that’s what i try and do and then the absolute best and then google will find them through my website realize that these are good answers to these questions a lot of the questions no one else has answered so google will be like finally someone’s answered that so i will show that and i then repeat that process over and over again so this isn’t the easiest thing to do there are some challenges that are associated with making money online in this way the first and biggest challenge is finding good questions so as we saw i did the question about the led lights and that’s something i think i looked at it the the page gets 60 visitors per month or in the last month they got 60 visitors that’s not a lot and you don’t make a lot of money per visitor so that article might make me you know maybe $1 maybe $2 a month or $20 over the course of a year something around that sort of mark maybe even less than that
so i put a lot of effort into that article and it’s only making me $20 a year but that article will probably make that $20 a year for about four or five six years or something like that because people will continually ask that question so with my time and spending my time on that maybe that article took me a day or took me half a day is it worth it i don’t know so finding those good questions that both have the volume of people are actually asking this but also haven’t been answered really well by really good websites that are well trusted by google that can be really hard another challenge is setting up and managing those websites you need to know how it’s not that hard to do but there is some technical expertise required to actually set up your website manage the running of the website you got to pay for hosting you got to as your website gets more traffic you’ve got to upgrade your hosting and pay more there’s some challenges there making money can also be a challenge zone carbon positive life this website makes hardly any money as we saw previously if i turn my ad blocker off there are some ads that are run on this site but i haven’t put a lot of effort into making sure that the ads are in the right locations or anything like that so it doesn’t really make much money so Making money can be a problem time, both the amount of time you need to spend writing articles. But when I wrote these challenges, time was a factor in actually making the money. So when you write an article, it doesn’t necessarily go on the first page of Google straightaway, like when we search for how to find positive cash flow properties. I wasn’t number one on Google the next day getting 1000s of visits per month to my article, even with established websites, like on property and some of the other ones that I own. I’ll write an article. And it will be months before that article sees any traction, or any traffic at all. Actually, this month, I noticed one of my articles shoot up and start doing well in the rankings. And that was an article that I wrote in November. So it was a really poorly performing article for November, December, January, February, March, five months, and then in the sixth month, it just all of a sudden shut up and started doing well. So that article basically made me no money for the first five months, and is only now starting to make me money. So you put in a lot of work in the beginning. And you don’t get a lot of income back in the beginning. But what happens is, over time, as you build these up, you see that led article that I wrote years ago. And then if you’re building that up, and you’ve got 10s, you’ve got hundreds of those that you’re building up over the years, you start to have this whole library of content, that each of them is generating you a little bit, but you don’t need to work on those anymore. And so that’s where the passive income comes into it. And then the last problem is volume, and getting from just one article to 10 articles, to 100 articles to 1000. If you want to actually make any decent amount of money in this, then you do need some volume in terms of how many articles you write. And if you’ve got a full time job where you’re running your business or something like that, finding time to write articles can be tricky, trying to write a couple per week or one per day, or a couple per day, which is where I’m at. But that’s because I do this full time for my business. But getting the volume out where you can actually make significant money through this is difficult. So starting on the side, it’s really slow going, it’s slow in the beginning for those articles to start making money, it’s slow to get the volume going as well. But then once it starts rolling and got that catalog, that’s when you can be in a position that I was in, you know, back a couple of years ago, where my websites are all set up making money. And I spent a couple of years where I didn’t have to work long term for me now property is going to be my passive income stream for the long term. But business is a great passive income stream for the short term and the way that I invest the majority of my time to make money. So I hope that this little explainer video has helped to show you how I make money online by answering questions and how you can do it as well. If you want to see more content like this, then please give this video a thumbs up so I know that my community likes this. Also leave a comment in the comment section down below, letting me know what sort of questions you have and what things you might like to know about if this is something that you want to hear more about from me. So thanks so much for tuning in today on this non property related content. I wish you the absolute best in your property journey, as well as your passive income journey. And until next time, stay positive