A way to increase your income while homeschooling

I’ve read a lot about how some homeschooling moms do X, Y and Z to supplement their family’s main income while homeschooling. Some of the advice is sound, other stuff is just crazy.

But I recently heard from an Internet marketer who follows a simple plan to make an affiliate revenue of nearly $30,000 a month. What I’m suggesting is a variation on his plan that won’t necessarily make over six figures a year, but it will begin to bring in revenue almost immediately, and it fits in quite excellently with homeschooling.

This particular marketer creates small content sites. He picks a subject — say migrane headaches — and does three things 1) he finds about 20 affiliate programs that are related or that have products he can sell to his new market, 2) he creates a small site with between 5 and 20 articles about the subject and a sign up form to an email newsletter about the subject on every page, 3) then he builds a series of at least 50 short emails to send to that list once a week. In each email, he promotes one affiliate product.

Once the 50 emails are written and set up in an autoresponder, he does a bit of promoting of the site, then lets nature, or Google, take its course.

And then he begins on the next site.

For homeschoolers, this would actually work quite well if each site was a unit study. For example, if you’re studying weather, you could sell weather stations, books from amazon, all sorts of stuff from ebay, etc. Most of the research for the article pages and emails is going to be done in the course of the unit anyway, so why not take advantage of all your research and make a site out of it?

Other topics might not lend themselves so well to affiliate sales, so perhaps just a small site with adsense ads on it would add a few bucks a month to your coffers.

Now, I know this isn’t so far off from what many other people suggest doing, but what I’ve seen in the online homeschool community is that when homeschoolers build informational sites, their target is other homeschoolers. I’m suggesting that if you’re learning how to write short stories, that you target your site “how to write short stories” site to writers and aspiring authors, not people teaching their kids how to write. The market is bigger, longer term, and more willing to spend money on the subject.

I made my first site in this vein a few weeks ago, and, although it’s not on the most marketable topic, it has made enough in amazon commissions from the first 40 subscribers that I will be able to buy a couple of books with the gift certificate they’ll send me at the end of the quarter.

PS. Although this might sound like putting the cart before the horse, if you’ve got older kids hoping to make a bit of spending cash over the summer, they can use Niche Inspector to find profitable topics, and spend their summer researching and writing things you probably wouldn’t otherwise cover in the school year.

Tags: homeschool, working homeschool, sahm

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 23rd, 2007 at 10:51 am and is filed under Homeschooling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.