The Keyword Academy, run by two guys named Court and Mark, is one of those websites that talks about how to make money online. They have a free blog with tons of information, and they also have a paid course that they say will teach you how to make some real money on the Internet. Is it any good? Is it a scam? Let’s see what they can actually teach us.

TKA Pro

Mary and I have been a member of TKA Pro for nearly 1 year now, and I can tell you that the Keyword Academy is definitely not a scam. The first clue that says they’re legit is their free blog, which has over 100 articles on making money online. If you were to read all of those articles, and put what you learned into practice, that alone would probably be enough information to get you started making an income online.

But the real value of TKA comes when you join TKA Pro. The curriculum and tools that have made available to the members of TKA Pro are flat out incredible. Let’s see what you get for joining.

Curriculum and Tools

The first thing that you get when you join is access to TKA’s Core Videos. This is a group of 9 videos that take you step by step through the process of identifying niches, building websites, creating content, and monetizing them. And when I say step by step, I mean that Court literally goes through the entire process with you in the videos, showing you exactly what to do.

One of the things that used to stop me from buying courses like this in the past was wondering if I was going to get any concrete, actionable information or just a lot of fluff. Am I going to be learning from someone who has done this already, or am I going to be “learning” from other people who are in the same boat as I am?

When you sign up for TKA Pro, you get tons of concrete information that will leave you no doubt as to what you need to do next. If you watch the Core Videos and follow the steps that they give you, you’ll have 10 to 15 websites set up in a few weeks, ready to target their specific niches.

As far as the tools that you get, TKA Pro gives you access to Niche Refinery, a super awesome keyword tool; the Guest Posting System, which allows you to build organic traffic to your site; Connect Content, a passive link building tool; and the TKA Pro forums, where you can talk and exchange ideas with other members of the site. If there is a tool that you need – actually need – to make money online, Court and Mark either have it or can tell you where to get it.

(Just a side note on the forums. There are two types of MMO forums out there: 1) the kind where any legitimate plea for help or sincere comment is immediately swallowed up by a barrage of “internet marketers” trying to sell you something, and 2) the kind where everyone sits around a campfire singing Kumbaya and talking about how great it would be to actually make some money online. The TKA Pro forums are neither of those. So… I guess there are three types of MMO forums.)

In addition to the core curriculum and tools, Court and Mark also do a monthly webinar for TKA Pro members that covers the latest things that they’ve learned and new techniques that you can implement on your own sites. These webinars are great and I’ve learned as much from them as I did from the Core Videos.

What Does TKA Pro Teach?

As I mentioned in my article on Making Money Online, the steps to making money on the internet are pretty simple: 1) set up a website, 2) get people to visit your website, and 3) sell them something. However, making money on the internet is a lot like playing chess – you can learn the basics in an afternoon, and then you can spend the rest of your life trying to master it.

TKA Pro teaches both the basics and the subtleties that you need to know to master internet marketing. They take you step by step through setting up your first few websites, and then teach you the principles that you need to know to make a real income from your IM business.

What TKA Pro Is Not

This is not a get-rich-quick scheme in any sense of the word. You will most likely not make much, if any, money from the TKA methods for several months. Depending on how much time you can spend doing this, I’d say you’re looking at 6 to 12 months before you’re making a decent amount of money. If you’re in a financial crisis and need to make some quick cash, this is not the program for you. If you need to be making $5,000 a month in 60 days, this is not the program for you. If, on the other hand, you are looking for a method of setting up passive income systems, then the Keyword Academy is definitely worth checking out.

Cost

TKA Pro costs $67 a month (and I can guarantee you it’s worth far more than that), but you can give it a try for $1. You get full access to everything I mentioned above – the Core Videos, the tools, the forums, the webinars – and you can check it all out for one full month. The subscription is billed through Paypal, so you can cancel it any time on your own. (You don’t have to call an 800-number during a lunar eclipse and submit a blood sample to get them to cancel your subscription.)

If you’ve been trying to make money online and haven’t figured out how yet, or are just intrigued by the idea of having a website that makes you money, check out the Keyword Academy. They are the real deal.

Still have more questions? I answer some of the more popular questions in the TKA Pro FAQ.

In this post (and possibly the next couple as well) I want to take a look at the reality of making money online and discuss how it’s different from what most people think. We’ll also talk about what you should know if you are interested in making money online, and what you should look into before you start.

Why Make Money Online?

To start off, let’s talk about why the Internet is such a great opportunity for people who are interested in making some money on their own. I can sum it up in four points.

Little to no money required – You can start up a website for under $20, or even for free if you want to. If you wanted to start up a traditional business, you’re going to have a significant amount of expenses before you can really get going – start up costs, legal fees, office space, employees, advertising, etc. But you can start putting up a website right after breakfast and be done by lunch.

Easy access – Just about everyone has access to the Internet. All you need is a computer and a phone line, and if you can’t get those on your own, your public library will probably let you use theirs for free.

Huge audience – According to the latest data, there are now more than 1.7 billion people online across the world. That is a staggeringly huge potential audience for your website. If you could get your product, service or ad in front of one-half of one percent of those people, you could be extremely wealthy.

And lastly, the number one reason that the Internet is so great is that it make it easy to establish passive income systems. If you set up a website and then go eat a sandwich, the website doesn’t stop working while you’re eating. No matter what you’re doing – sleeping, playing, working, whatever – your website is still working to generate traffic. That’s an incredibly powerful tool for your business that you should not pass up.

So How Do You Make Money Online?

There are several ways to go about making money online (far too many to sum up in one article) but let’s talk today about the most popular method. It’s actually fairly simple in theory, and it goes a little something like this: You make a website, people come visit your website, and then you sell them something. In this regard, having a website really isn’t that much different than running a traditional, brick and mortar business. Not everyone that comes by will buy your product or services, but if you get enough people coming in you’re going to start making sales. Let’s take a look at each of those three steps in greater detail.

Make a website – This step is really much easier than people usually think it’s going to be. You can set up a simple website using free tools available online in just a few hours. If you want to own your website, you’ll need to purchase a domain, get a hosting plan and then get some content up on it (use Wordpress for getting content on your site). You can also go the free route and get a website up with Blogger or another similar service, but you won’t own your site. It’s probably better to spend $10 or $20 and get your own site set up.

Get traffic – There are several options for getting traffic to your website. You can pay for it (using Adwords or another ad network), you can use social media (such as Stumbleupon or Digg) or you can to try increase your visibility in Google and other search engines. If you are trying to make money from your website, the best traffic generating method, by far, is to rank as high in the search engines as you possibly can for your niche.

Sell them something – As with generating traffic, you have several options for monetizing your website. The quickest and easiest solution is to use Google Adsense on your site. You can also sell someone else’s product (called affiliate sales) or sell your own product directly. Adsense is a popular choice for many webmasters, but it may not provide the best long-term solution for monetization.

There’s a quick intro to making money online. I think I’ll explore this topic more fully in my next few posts.

Earned vs. Passive Income

Most people make money by trading their time for a salary. You work 40 hours a week, and your employer gives you a paycheck a couple of times each month. It’s a pretty simple deal. You come in and work, and you get paid. Stop coming into work, and you stop getting paid. This is called earned income. The amount you get paid is directly related to the amount that you work. (There are always some exceptions to this rule. For instance, vacation and paid leave allow you to not work and still get paid, but the rule still stands. If you stop going into work, you will stop getting paid.)

Passive income (or its cousin, residual income) is different from earned income in that it doesn’t require you to trade your time directly for money. Passive income is generated by systems that earn money constantly, regardless of whether you are working on that system or not.

When most people first hear about passive income, a lot of these terms don’t really make sense. “What exactly do you mean by a “system”? “How does it earn me money when I’m not working on it?” Let’s take a deeper look at some passive income systems and exactly how they generate income.

Passive Income Systems

A passive income system is simply any business, job, or property (physical, intellectual or otherwise) that continues to produce income for you even when you are not working on it. Here are some examples.

Investments – Probably the most “pure” example of passive income is having a large amount of money invested in the stock market, and living off of the interest generated by your investments. This leaves the principal free to be reinvested, generate more income, and the cycle repeats itself. Unfortunately, this option needs large sums of money to make it work, so unless you are already independently wealthy this is not really an option.

Owning a Business – Owning a business can be a great source of passive income. Hire a manager to take care of the day-to-day operations, and your business will generate income even when you’re not there to run it. You can even start a franchise – such as a fast food restaurant, shipping store or janitorial service – and you won’t have to come up with the basic idea or business plan by yourself.

Rental Properties – Have you ever rented a house or apartment? Did you notice how your rent was due every month, regardless of how often you saw the landlord? That sounds suspiciously like passive income. If you own the property, your tenants pay their rent on a regular basis, whether you are there working on the house or not.

Running a Website – Running/owning a website or blog is another great source of passive income. Once you have a decent amount of traffic coming in, there are several methods of monetizing the site: putting up advertisements, charging for content, selling a product, etc. The point being, readers/users are still coming to the site even when you’re asleep, thereby helping you make money.

The common factor in all of these systems is that your time is not tied together with the amount you get paid. This is unfortunate at the beginning because you’ll be working long hours for very little pay. But after while, if you keep at it, your income will start to increase. At some point your income will be roughly approximate to what you would expect to get paid in a similar salaried position. At that time you can decide whether to invest more of your time into your business to increase your salary even higher, or whether you want to lower your hours to spend time on other projects.

Maintenance

There’s one other thing to mention on this topic and that is the maintenance you’ll need to do on these systems. No matter what sort of system you set up or how well it’s done, you’ll always have to spend some amount of time maintaining the system to keep it going. If you have several million dollars in the stock market, you (or your financial advisor) will have to keep an eye on how your investments are doing to make sure you’re still making money. If you own rental houses and you never maintain them, before too long the roofs are going to be full of holes, the gardens will be full of weeds and you won’t be able to find anyone to rent them from you.

Don’t confuse maintenance with being tied to the clock like a real job. You still get to choose when to work on your business(es), you get to choose whether to do the work yourself or pay someone else to do it, you get to decide what needs to be done about problems that arise, etc. You’re still in charge.

So what other passive income systems are there? I always love hearing about how other people are using some creativity to make money. Let me know in the comments if I’ve missed any.

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This is Part Two in my series on passive income. Check out the other parts below.

1) All Income Is Not Equal
2) Using Passive Income Systems To Make Money