$7,000 in Passive Income | How to Build a Website That Makes Money

I'm about to show you guys a website that I build a couple years ago the cool thing about this website is in the last few years it's made me over seven thousand dollars and even cooler than that I've had to do very little to make that money this has been really really easy for me to do and it's very easy for somebody else to replicate what I've done I've I no means is this something special or specific to just myself you can do the exact same thing on my youtube channel I have a goal of being incredibly transparent I don't want to lead people astray and make it seem easier or more difficult than it really is I really just want to give you the real facts so I'm never going to tell you to start a Shopify store and then a week from now you're gonna be making thirty thousand dollars in sales I mean no that's just stupid like I want to give you the cold hard facts and this is how I built this website and it really was not that difficult this is absolutely something that you could do for yourself to generate some extra site income and I'm gonna show you how to do it right now what is going on guys welcome back to the channel I'm Bryce with sane sense where we talk about everything from personal finance to real estate investing today we're gonna talk about how you can build a side hustle from a website to help you generate some passive income whenever I begin any kind of new site hustle I have one rule in mind and that rule is that it has to be passive at some point in the future I mean I realized that there's a lot of work that it'll have to go into it right now but that's totally fine but I'm not gonna start a for example a housecleaning business or you know anything like that because it's not it's not passive it's it's I'm gonna have to trade my time for hours and at no point can that business become passive unless I build it big enough to have employees underneath me but you know I just I don't have interest in that so like I said the businesses that I do and try to create on the side it has to be passive and this is absolutely something that is passive so before I get right into it I want to give you a little bit of a backstory about why I created this website and kind of what the the purpose and intent of it was for those of you who don't know I went to college at a private university in a really small town in Idaho and when I say small I mean small the town has a total population of I think twenty five thousand and fifteen thousand of that is the student population so when the students go home at the end of the semester the city legitimately loses more than half of this population the town itself has maybe seven miles in diameter so I mean it it's yeah it's pretty small now because of the small size of the the town and the school itself there there wasn't a lot to do I mean there wasn't like a big nightlife there wasn't really a music scene so basically if you wanted to go out and have fun you had to create it yourself if you weren't a local to the city you were coming from a bigger city I mean this was definitely a culture shock it was a very kind of a unique place to go to school it was really interesting to me because everywhere I went when I was on campus when I was off I would I would hear people walk past me and they would say man I hate living here it sucks it's small there's there's nothing to do I I just I hate it here but I found that so interesting because I was having the time of my life like I was out with friends we were doing this we were doing that and I was having a blast so I just didn't understand why all these people were saying there's nothing to do right in that moment I decided you know what I'm gonna build a website and I'm just gonna list all of the things that I found that are really fun to do around town throw it on a website and then hopefully that can help other people just kind of generate ideas and you know find out some fun things to do in the town and so that's exactly what I did every time my friends and I would go out and do something I would take out my phone and I'd you know jot down like a couple of notes I would take my camera and just snap a few pictures of the different things that we were doing and then when I got home I would just do a quick write-up on the website and say this is something that we did it was really fun this is how you get there these are the directions here are some pictures it was kind of cold I wish I brought a jacket or the shoes that I brought weren't you know the best maybe you should bring some hiking shoes you know just I kind of just did a brief description of what we did and what I wish I had known before going so that when other people did that they would know what I thought I had known before now I just kept this up I would do this over and over as we go out and do more things I would just create a new write-up and just then create another write-up and create another right up and over time there became a decent amount of articles on my website of all these things that do in this really tiny college town now when I began this website I legitimately had no plan to monetize it whatsoever I had no plans of making money from it I really just wanted to build this website to help other people one day I was going through my Google Analytics and I clicked on this website and I kind of forgot about checking my analytics honestly like I just I built the website and I didn't bother checking to see the traffic up the website so I looked at my analytics and like I was blown away at the amount of traffic that was coming to my website in that moment after seeing all that traffic I said to myself we'll shoot I'm gonna throw some ads on here and I'm gonna see if I can make some money on it and so that's exactly what I did I signed up for Adsense Google Adsense I threw some ads on the website and within a couple of days I was making money well the website that I built is called Rex Burton fun that's that's the college town that I went to is called Rexburg you feel free to free to check it out but you know you can just go through here and for example the college town that I went to is really close to Yellowstone so I did a write-up of how to do Yellowstone and see the majority of the sites in just one day so as you scroll through here you can see you know some some pictures of me and some friends I just go through and say hey we went we saw this spring we saw Old Faithful we saw the Yellowstone Grand Canyon tower Falls the hot springs and you know I just snapped a couple pictures showed some of the animals you know and then I just wrote up and said we did this we did this I really wish I had done this and I just that's all I did is I just wrote about our experience and then I threw it online there are also some really cool caves around the area that you can hike up to so I I did did I write of the the trailhead is kind of hard to get to and so I put some GPS coordinates so that people could see and then you know I just snapped some pictures and just kind of show it my experience as we went through this whole thing shuts him in you know some inside pictures of the cave and yeah so it's really cool so over time people began to to see this website and their thing on cool you know I'll go and do that that's a good idea nearly six years later since I started this website it's still generating income for me and I don't touch it at all I literally haven't added a new entry since June of 2017 and I still make anywhere between 100 and 150 dollars a month every month from Google each and every month Google just automatically does a direct deposit into my checking account and that's all there is to it like I said I have not touched this website if you don't believe me let me let me show you the deposits into my bank account so if I search here for Google and hit enter okay so here's one for one hundred and twenty one dollars use another one for one hundred and seven dollars one hundred sixty two hundred and forty six hundred and ten one hundred and six hundred and sixty three so Google just deposits these into my bank account and like I said I have not touched this website in a couple years and yet the checks still keep rolling in now of course one hundred and fifty dollars like that's not that much money it's it's really not going to be life-changing but for the amount of work that I put into this website like I really just haven't had to do that much so like I said before what I did is absolutely something that you could replicate what I mean what I did was no secret anybody could create a website and throw some content on there and if it's valuable enough and people want to read it then you can absolutely make money through ads but the biggest thing that I have to stress is you have to provide value if you do some quick write ups throw it on a web page and just expect traffic to come that's not going to happen you have to do a little bit more than that it has to be actually something that people really want to read in fact I have a friend who lives in Dallas and he saw the money that I was making from this website and he tried to do the exact same thing he tried to replicate but he did exactly what I told him not to do which is create a website and then in one day he wrote 20 articles they were this short he pulled some images off Google threw it on the web page and said okay maybe you know where's let's make some money after six months he was wondering why he wasn't making millions of dollars and he said Bryce your system is broken it's dumb I'm not doing this anymore and he you know he deleted the website I think the difference is the motive and the perspective I genuinely wanted to help people that was the purpose of my website and so I wanted to answer the question that tons of students had which was what is there to do around here so people had this question and I provided them with the answer not only that I provided extra value with descriptions and maps and pictures and things that I wish I had done differently I provided the value which ultimately brought them to my website but if that sounds like something that you want to do then I'm gonna show you how you can build your own website right now and do the exact same thing the first thing you're gonna need to do is sign up with a web hosting company now myself personally I choose Bluehost just because they're cheap and they've done really well for me if you're not tech savvy at all I'm gonna try and go through this and hopefully I don't lose you it's really not that complicated but I'll try and make it as simple as possible essentially web hosting is just your rent on the internet when you build a website you have to put it in a central location so that people all around the world can access it so if you're not paying for web hosting then how is anybody gonna find it I like Bluehost so much that we've actually teamed up with them and there's a link down in the description where you can sign up with them and you can get hosting for three ninety-five a month I mean four dollars a month for web hosting is super cheap you can't beat that and Bluehost is a great company to go through I use Bluehost for the majority of my websites when I was first starting out and you really just you can't beat the value okay so first things first you're gonna click on the green get started button and then it's gonna show you all these different options basic plus choice plus Pro just choose basic I mean you you can expand as needed but just if you're getting started just choose basic click on that okay now we need to choose a domain either you've already purchased a domain which I'm going to assume that you haven't so we need to create a new domain the domain name is essentially just the name of your website what do you want to call it like I said my website was Rexburg fun let's say we're gonna do this in Dallas so we're gonna try Dallas fun calm and say next ok so it looks like that domain is not available for registration and that's that's very common a lot of times you're going to try and purchase a domain name but it's already taken so you're gonna have to kind of do some trial and error until you find a domain name that hasn't already been purchased or is not being used so let's try no let's try ok next you're going to go through and you're gonna fill out all of this information and under package extras this is a lot of extra crap you really don't need so you can go ahead and uncheck all of that ok we're gonna put in our credit card information and we're gonna click on submit once you finally get signed into the Bluehost portal you're gonna have to go through and verify your email address and go through a couple more pages but just go through it's really easy they'll walk you through once you get logged into Bluehost you're gonna click over here on the left side where it says my sites and then you're gonna click on the big blue button that says create site so you click on that what about the site name to be we're doing and a tagline is fun things again all this you can change after the fact that's fine so we're gonna click on next and then we're going to go through again just a couple more steps it's gonna ask you a few more things but eventually it'll kick you back to this this front front screen under the my site section and then finally it will click here and say logging into WordPress ok so once you get logged in it's gonna take you to the WordPress panel and just for the sake of time I'm not going to walk you through how to actually build your website there are a lot of tutorials out there on YouTube about how to create a WordPress website just go through and look through those if I were to include something like that in here this video would never end so we're not gonna do that now again I already said this but I want to stress again that this is not an instantaneous thing after you build your website you're gonna have to go through and tweak your SEO you're gonna have to add some meta descriptions you're gonna have to submit it to Google so that they can crawl your website to actually get it listed on Google there there's a lot of things that you have to do but like I said like I can't I can't include all those things in in this video after a few months you'll slowly start to see traffic trickle in when I when I built this website I didn't keep in mind the fact that I'm targeting a very small geographic area so I actually did myself a disservice and I'm limiting the amount of traffic that I can get because I'm only going to get traffic from people from a really small town if you have a niche that's less competitive or covers a larger geographical area you have a lot more potential to get more traffic than I do which in turn means more money I also want to kind of put in here this this plug if everything that I've gone through up until this point is really overwhelming I want to I want to pitch my own service so I I have a web hosting company and we take care of everything we take care of the web hosting we take care of backups we take care of the SSL Certificates we take care of everything so that you don't have to do the technical stuff all you do is you log into your WordPress panel you tweak your website and everything is good to go we we take care of everything if this is too daunting reach out to me I'd love to get you set up on our service it's really affordable just reach out to me happy to help you okay let's fast forward six months from now let's say your website is set up you've got everything squared away there's traffic coming to your website you want to have a minimum absolute minimum of 1,000 views per month potentially more if you can more I mean if you can have 5,000 monthly views that's a great place to start but I wouldn't put ads on your website until you have at least 5,000 unique monthly views I use Google Adsense for all of them I add placement basically what you do is you go to Google Adsense you sign up for their service and then they're gonna give you a code that you just copy and paste onto your website and then it's gonna generate all of the ads for you so whenever you click on one of these articles you'll notice that over here on the right side I've got this ad that's the great part about Google Adsense is you don't have to do anything it automatically targets the ads towards the viewer who's on your website every time that somebody clicks on this ad I make anywhere from 10 cents up to I think one time I had 17 dollars for one single click that was super rare but typically it's between 10 cents to a dollar fifty per click Google Adsense is really particular on the requirements before they let you join the program basically you'll have to yell to Google and there's there's a list out there of all the different things that they want you to do but once you meet all of those requirements like for example you have to have a privacy policy on your website and you have to have a disclaimer that says hey I run ads on this website once once you reach all of these different things then you can submit your website for review Google will review it and then they'll approve you let you into the program and then you can then you can start making money I'm not I'm not a hundred percent in love with Google Adsense there are actually better ways to make more money without using Google I could actually remove Google's ads from my website and target local businesses and probably make two to three hundred dollars a month instead of just 150 that making like I said though Google Adsense is really easy you just copy and paste the code put it on your website and then I don't have to think about it I don't have to mark it I don't have to go out and look for business but I just want to let you know that Google Adsense is actually probably one of the ways to make the least amount of money if you have a website with good traffic you can make a lot more money elsewhere using a different ad network whoo okay so I just threw a ton of stuff at you guys in a really short amount of time by no means is this a comprehensive you know deep dive of everything there is to know about will building a website throwing Google Adsense on there and generating the income this could very easily be a two to three hour video if I were to go through and explain everything that you need to know but really just the purpose of this video is to show you that you can make money and you can make passive income from a website without doing a ton of work as I mentioned earlier I haven't touched this website in two years and yet I still get checks every single month from Google doing literally nothing I've also said this two or three times already but again I want to stress this is not something that happens overnight it's gonna take you minimum of six months before you start seeing enough traffic that is worthy enough to monetize to even begin making money but if it's something that you really want to do it's absolutely achievable and there is a way to make money from it that's it for this video guys thanks so much for watching like I said I just went over a ton of stuff so if you have any questions be sure to comment down below I'm happy to help you out with whatever I can if you like videos like this be sure to give me that thumbs up really helps us with the YouTube algorithm and of course be sure to subscribe as well so that you can notified each and every week as we post new videos thanks for watching guys and we'll see you next week [Music]

Channel: Bryce Matheson

Views: 108,219

Keywords: passive income, how to make passive income, passive income online, how to make money from a website, how to build a website, bluehost, how to make money online, passive income from websites, grant cardone, graham stephan, nate obrien, jj buckner, hostgator, vps, web hosting, google adsense, adsense, make money from ads, make money from ads online

Id: VIQIWbB6C_s

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2019