Tips, Ideas, Product Reviews & Software Development by Leo Liu

It’s time again for me to do a little reflection on last year and some planning for my online business going forward for 2012.

First of all, I am very thankful that I have broken the old record again this 2011 Christmas season. After a frustrating start with Amazon (see my other post here), I was pleasantly surprised with the sales numbers. This year I have built a few sites that focus on higher ticket items (commissions are around $100 to $150 per sale). Those are not the items you would think of as Christmas “gifts” but their sales also increases just as toys, electronic gadgets, and other gift items. And that really contributed to my bottom line for 2011.

After a year of fighting Google updates and sandboxing, I am so glad that 2011 ended on an up note. There is no better feeling than knowing that your living expenses for the next 6 months are covered. It certainly takes the pressure off.

For 2012 and beyond, I will only focus on building PASSIVE income. I used to think that’s what I have been doing with my online business. Turns out I was dead wrong.

It sounds great that you can just build a few affiliate sites, get top ranking on Google to get “free” traffic, and just put everything on “auto-pilot.” After all, that’s what the gurus would have you believe.

What I have realized is that there is nothing passive about SEO. To qualify as “passive” it must be something that you work on once, then just need minimum effort to maintain it. In fact, SEO is by far the most labor intensive method to make money on the Internet.

And the traffic is NOT free, either. Despite all the gurus out there who claim they did not “pay a dime for all these traffic,” SEO is actually very expensive. To be able to maintain top ranking you must constantly adding content and links, which means paying money for content writing and backlinking. And you won’t even see the results until 3 to 6 months later, if ever.

Compare that to paid traffic methods. You can spend as little as $20 to $50 to test a campaign and within days you will know if it’s going to work. Then you can decide to scale up or move on.

With SEO, you are always one Google update away from losing your entire business. It doesn’t matter if you have the best content and serve your visitors better than anyone else. This is definitely not the way to build a long term, sustainable business.

In my previous post I mentioned publishing ebooks on Kindle. This fits my definition of “passive income” perfectly. For example, after everybody getting a Kindle as their Christmas gift, they start loading it up with ebooks. Right now I am seeing my ebook sales doubled. The books are selling and earning money while I have not touched them since they first published 5 months ago. They will continue to do so day after day, year after year.

So there you have it. My plan for 2012 – plain and simple. I will be focusing on Kindle publishing while maintaining the affiliate sites I still have until around October – that’s when my Christmas campaign will be kicking off again with another great ending for 2012.

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