The following is an unsolicited guest post from one of our students, a great guy who goes by the handle ’skinnyninja’ in our forums. Yes, he is skinny. And yes, he is a ninja. In addition to building his passive income online, he supports the addiction recovery community with a really amazing blog. Anyone struggling with any addictions (or even bad habits) would be wise to check it out.

Let me introduce myself:

* I am a student of The Keyword Academy.

* I signed up for the 1 dollar trial at TKA back in April of 2009, so I have been in the program for a little over a year now. 

* Before joining TKA, I worked very hard on a single website for 3 years, but it was not making much money to really speak of.  Some days I would make a dollar or even less in Adsense earnings.

Let’s cut right to the chase: after about a year of learning and applying new knowledge, my results can speak for themselves.  This money shot is for the last seven days, not an entire month:

Now obviously, $199 for a week in Adsense earnings will translate into some nice monthly earnings.  $800 dollars or so each month in passive earnings is not to bad for 10 months worth of effort, right?  It is certainly the best investment that I have made in quite a while.  I mean, what would you be doing with an extra $800 in cash every month?  I have it flowing into my life right now, with almost no additional work to maintain it, and let me tell you….it makes a huge difference! 

Please keep in mind that I work a full time job in the real world and do not possess amazing internet marketing skills or anything.  I am just a regular guy who was looking for an additional stream of income, and started looking for a way to learn more about how to make money online.

You are probably wondering how I was able to produce $800 per month in passive earnings using the Keyword Academy program.  I’m going to break it down into the key areas where I think the real value comes from, and how I make more money because of it:

* Extreme focus
* Support and community
* TKA Tools
* Leadership and challenges

Extreme focus

Making money on the internet can be absolutely overwhelming.  There are so many different methods you could test out, so many different techniques you could try.  This might include anything from selling stuff on eBay, to writing freelance articles for extra cash, to attempting what Court and Mark teach to develop a passive stream of income from search engine traffic.  Some people get overwhelmed before they even choose a direction to go in! 

On top of the confusing options, the market is littered with scams, especially in the make money online world.  It is a rare treat to find someone who is willing to give you 100% full access to everything for a measly one dollar test drive….not to mention that they make this offer for an entire month. 

A big part of what helped me in getting to my income goal was increased focus.  Court and Mark actually harp on this concept quite a bit, because it produces results in the real world.  They have a detailed system for generating traffic and then making money from that traffic, and they are fanatical about cutting out the extra fluff that does not lead to increased income.  Every single action you take when working on internet marketing should be driving you towards your income goals.  The TKA program has a number of ways that they go about enhancing focus for students.

Part of the success of the TKA program is in the focus and the simplicity.  Court and Mark are teaching you how to generate search engine traffic, period.  Yes, there are a million little details to pile on top of this.  Is the topic profitable?  Do searchers for a certain keyword tend to click ads or ignore them?  Is there enough income potential with a keyword to make it worthwhile?  Could we make more money by ditching Adsense and selling affiliate products instead?  And on and on.  But the core program sweeps everything aside and shows you how to answer all of these questions, and more, with focus and simplicity.  In fact, the program allows for plenty of expansion and flexibility, in that once you learn how to choose the optimal keywords for your topic and start generating traffic, it then becomes quite easy to test different methods of monetization, optimize for different keywords, expand into other keyword categories, and so on. 

Also, once you learn how to focus on the actions that produce traffic and income, it becomes so much easier to replicate those actions and scale your efforts up.  With so much clutter and junk in the world of internet marketing, it is nice to be able to sweep 99 percent of it aside and learn how to engage in the actions that can grow your passive earnings.

How focus has helped me make more money:

 At one point in my internet marketing career, I was checking my earnings once per day, and was always devastated when it was not higher than it was the day before.  Both Court and Mark helped me achieve a mental breakthrough–both in different ways and in slightly different areas–that allowed me to truly separate what made a day successful for me or not.  Once I was able to separate my earnings for the day from the amount of work I was doing, I was able to rapidly accelerate my marketing efforts and my income started to jump.  This mental conditioning led to some pretty big action for me, and helped me to move beyond a plateau that I was stuck at for months.  As a result, my income pretty much doubled over a period of 90 days, and it has been steadily rising ever since then.

You may have a website, or a couple of websites, and you put in some tough work and you get to a point where your earnings sort of levels off for a while, and you can’t really see the next major leap to make.  I have been at this point at least twice in the last 10 months.  Each time, I was able to break through this point after listening to either Court or Mark during a live webinar.  I came away from the live session with a spark of inspiration and an idea, a feeling of “I can do this!”  And thus I would start taking massive action on my web properties, somehow putting in a ton of hard work in such a way so as to seriously boost my earnings in the long run.  And both times that this happened–when I attacked my business with renewed focus–I always saw a substantial leap in earnings within the next 90 days. 

Focus is such a huge part of internet marketing, because the hard work that we put in today will not pay dividends from an SEO standpoint for several weeks or even months.  So my breakthroughs have always occurred when Court and Mark were able to convince me to take it on blind faith that “If you do X, you will get Y.”  Rinse and repeat.

Support and community

In my opinion, the forum alone is worth the price of admission.  Ask an honest question or request some feedback or opinions, and you get it right away, within an hour or less.  Instant guru help. In nearly every case, people who are earning thousands of dollars per month in internet marketing are jumping in left and right to help you with questions.  It really is an unbelievable community.  And of course, Court and Mark themselves are active on the forums, and this provides huge value as well.

Beyond the forum, there are other forms of support as well, and one of the biggest perks is a programming ninja named Peter that is on staff with Court and Mark.  He is a delight to work with, can resolve just about any technical issue, and provides incredible insight and new tools to the community. 

Participation in the private forum can be a double edged sword.  If you hang out there all day and fantasize about making money online, then you obviously are not taking the actions necessary to grow your income. 

Luckily, the TKA members help to keep each other in check with this a bit.  There are at least two nifty tricks built into the forum that make it more useful: a karma system and a badge system.  You can glance through a thread and quickly find the people who can speak with real authority, because these things are already in place to provide you with instant information.  This is not to say that the newcomer gets drowned out in the crowd, however.  Anyone can ask a question in the forums and instantly get expert advice and quality feedback within minutes.  I have never seen a question go unanswered.

How TKA support has helped me make more money:

Every couple of days I get an idea and I write up a forum post and bounce it off the community.  This is priceless.  I get ideas, other people weigh in with their ideas, and we all help each other to make more money.  I have hired people in the forums for various services, such as article writing, keyword research, and even link building, but this is all besides the point.  The instant feedback from dozens of professional internet marketers is what really keeps me coming back.  The reason I stick and stay is because I have this professional, high quality sounding board to test my ideas with. 

Tools

Here is what Court and Mark did: they hired an awesome programmer, explained the biggest bottlenecks in making money with their system, and then demanded that this guy come up with brilliant solutions that could automate nearly all of the grunt work.  What he came up with is fantastic, and there are least two major tools in the TKA program that more than make up for the price of admission, over and over again.  One tool helps you to find profitable keywords, the other helps you to rank well in the search engines.  Both tools are extremely powerful and are market leaders in their category.  Since they are private tools used only by the community, they may not be recognized as market leaders, but they are (I know because I have tested the market!). 

Really, these two tools are so good that Court and Mark could have easily justified commissioning their existence, even without ever sharing them with the community.  They are so powerful that just one person could benefit tremendously from them….so you can imagine how much value they add to an entire community.

How TKA tools have helped me make more money:

Without going into too much detail, let’s just say that roughly 90 percent of my efforts rely exclusively on tools that I use from the Keyword Academy.  Sure, I use some outside resources for things like content creation, creating and building links, and even finding keywords, but all of this has continued to shrink as the new tools at TKA have integrated most of my old methods.  The tools just automate everything and make it a “one stop shopping solution.”  No need to go elsewhere right now, as my income is steady rising with the tools I am working with.

Don’t get me wrong…the tools are not magic.  They do not make money rain down from the sky.  Ultimately, some bottlenecks still exist when it comes to increasing your income.  You still need lots of original content, you still have to find keywords, and you still have to create links.  The tools at TKA do a good job at making a serious dent in at least two of these areas.  But you will still have to put forth some real effort, and it always takes a bit of time to get things moving along as well.

Leadership and challenges

Part of the TKA program includes weekly webinars.  These are live audio and video broadcasts that you follow along with.  It is pretty impressive that you can actually ask questions during these broadcasts and get direct answers as well. 

Part of the challenge that Court and Mark face is in dealing with repeat questions, as well as newcomers to their program and people who have serious doubts about how it will all turn out.  Most students of internet marketing would much rather think about making money online rather than put in real work and effort….and this is exactly the sort of block that Court and Mark have been learning how to overcome in the minds of their students.

It has been impressive to watch these guys evolve as teachers.  You can tell that they have had moments of extreme frustration.  Yet they really have been able to push beyond that and use this as an opportunity to delve into the mind of the frustrated internet entrepreneur and make it into a lesson that can help everyone.  Their leadership, in this case, has pushed them to really learn what kinds of challenges are blocking their students, and how they can design challenges and goals that will produce real action and real results. 

A big part of this comes into play when Court will make a breakthrough of his own, and then share it with the community, challenging them to put in the same work to replicate his efforts.  He continues to push his students by pushing himself.  And now, many TKA members have come up with challenges of their own in the forums, and this is the type of atmosphere that helps to incite action and promote income growth.  

How TKA leadership has helped me make more money:

Like I said, I have experienced at least 2 major breakthroughs that have spurred me into action and drastically added to my bottom line.  One of these was inspired by Court and the other was inspired by Mark.  Each of these guys brings something unique to the table when it comes to teaching and instructing students.  Obviously, Court makes his own breakthroughs in the internet marketing world and then shares his success with others, pushing them to take action and duplicate his results.  Mark brings a business prowess to the table that is very professional and has actually shown me how to take my flagship website to the next level, something that I did not really believe could be achieved at first. 

I don’t just subscribe to Court and Mark because I think they are nice guys or because they like my website….I do it because they have taken me all the way to $800 per month in passive income!  For me, the continuing education that I get at the Keyword Academy is simply part of my business.  It is a lifeline that I would be crazy to go without, as the experience thus far has multiplied my income many times over. 

I am excited beyond words to look forward to the next year in internet marketing.  I am so grateful that I have this level of support as I transition to a full time income online.