A recent article on CNN Money confirms what most of us probably already know. It is getting tougher and tougher to fund our retirement years.

Traditional ways of funding our golden years have either lost value over the last three years, or simply can’t deliver sufficient income to pay for a decent standard of living.

To quote the CNN article, “Seventy-two percent of workers over the age of 60 who are putting off retirement are doing so because they can’t afford it, according to a survey by Careerbuilder.com, a career resources website. The results from the survey indicate more pessimism than in 2008, when about 60% of retirement-aged workers blamed the economy for delaying retirement.”

This is one of the reasons I wrote New Path to Riches. I’m not so very far from retirement age myself, and don’t intend to depend on my meagre retirement investments. Instead, for a few years now, I have been writing content-rich websites that provide me with a passive income every month, and will continue to do so for years to come.

The model and process I describe is ideally suited to anyone who is retired, or getting close.

In fact, I recently wrote a bonus chapter for my book, focusing specifically on why the New Path to Riches model works so well for people who are retired, and are looking for additional sources of income.

This bonus chapter is free.

If you or someone you know is either retired, or getting close, it’s worth reading.

If you connect with other people of the “golden age” through online groups or networks, feel free to share the chapter with all of them.

You can get the New Path to Retirement Riches bonus chapter here…

Most guides to making money online just tell you WHAT to do. “Follow my secret process and you’ll make a ton of money.”

But I don’t like following instructions blindly. I don’t just want to know WHAT to do. I also want to know WHY it works, WHY I should trust the process, and HOW the whole thing hangs together.

I guess I was one of those kids at school who was never satisfied with being told WHAT to do or learn, but wanted to know WHY and HOW.

I’m certainly not alone. There are a ton of studies that demonstrate how kids and adults alike learn better when they understand the broader context around the topic they are trying to understand.

Here are some of the WHY and HOW questions you will find answered in New Path to Riches.

How is it possible for someone sitting at home to create a website that attracts a large audience, and makes thousands of dollars a month?

Why now? Why is now such a perfect time to become a one-person publisher, sitting in your pyjamas?

Why are one-person websites able to compete so successfully with large, big-media websites?

How is it possible for a one-person website to do better than its larger competitors in the search engine results?

Of course, I also tell you WHAT to do. But because the book starts with answers to the big WHY and HOW questions, you can execute on WHAT to do with a complete understand of WHY and HOW it works.

To my mind, that’s a much smarter way of moving forward than simply following someone’s instructions blindly, and hoping for the best.

Buy New Path to Riches from Booklocker.com (also available as e-book)

Buy New Path to Riches from Amazon.com

Give New Path to Riches as a gift this Christmas

Maybe you already have your own copy of New Path to Riches. Maybe not.

Either way, I bet you can think of some friends, family members or colleagues who would love to find a way to make some extra money.

Maybe you have a teenage son or daughter who wants to save money for a car.

Or a close friend who wants to make money to send their kids to college.

Or a parent who is looking for a way to supplement their retirement income.

Or a colleague who needs extra money for medical bills.

Give them a copy of New Path to Riches this holiday season, and you’ll be giving them the opportunity to make a big second income from their own money-making website.

Yes, they will have to work hard on their website. No, they won’t make a million dollars.

But if they follow the model I describe in my book, they will start making a nice passive income each month.

In today’s economy, giving someone the chance to make some extra money each month, without even having to leave the house, is perhaps the most generous and thoughtful gift you can give.

Buy New Path to Riches from Booklocker.com (also available as e-book)

Buy New Path to Riches from Amazon.com

If you want to write a website that is going to attract tons of traffic and make you a passive income every month, the first job is to pick a topic that is of interest to enough people, but for which there is not too much competition.

There are plenty of ways to choose a few potential topics, the first being to think about your own areas of interest and expertise. It’s always easier to write about a subject that interests you.

Another lens through which you can study potential website ideas is to look at topics through the eyes of a beginner.

I say this because beginners in many areas of interest are not very well served online.

My own money-making website, CoffeeDetective.com, is aimed at beginners – people who are just becoming interested in brewing quality gourmet coffee at home. When I started with the site there were plenty of existing sites for “coffee geeks”, but almost nothing for people with a very low level of knowledge on the subject.

Look online and you will see that many information websites are written by experts either for other experts or for people with more than a rudimentary level of knowledge.

For example, go check out the websites and blogs that talk about high-tech gadgets. Few that I can find are really aimed at beginners.

What if I want to choose between an iPhone and one of the new Android smartphones? When I go to sites like Engadget.com and TechCrunch.com, their writers assume I already have a reasonable level of knowledge. What if I don’t? What if I don’t even know what half the terminology means?

The same goes for many subject areas – cycling, baking, making wine, brewing tea, traveling to Australia, playing jazz guitar, choosing a mortgage, buying gold coins, breeding cats, restoring furniture and so on.

Make a list of three or four topics you might like to write about, and then check out the existing websites online. Are the needs of beginners well served? If not, you might have just found the perfect focus for your own, money-making website.

You‘ll find more on this topic in my book, New Path to Riches.

Buy New Path to Riches from Booklocker.com (also available as e-book)

Buy New Path to Riches from Amazon.com

According to a November 20th article in The New York Times, nearly one in 10 homeowners in the U.S. are behind on their mortgage payments by at least one month.

That translates into about 5 million households having serious trouble making ends meet.

Life could get a little easier for every one of those households if someone in each home was writing a hobby website that brought in some extra cash.

Just one of my own money-making websites covers my mortgage, care payments, utilities and more, each and every month. And it is income I don’t have to ‘work” for. I just spend a couple of hours a week adding new pages to my website. The revenues from advertising and affiliate programs just keep flowing in.

This isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme, so if you start writing your website today, it won’t be helping with those mortgage payments for several months.

But that’s not a reason to delay getting started. The sooner you start building your own money-making website, the sooner it can start contributing to those monthly bills.

Is this something that can be done by someone with no sales or marketing experience? Absolutely. There are only three things you need to bring to the table.

1. You enjoy writing.

2. You are willing to learn.

3. You are stubborn, and will keep working on your site until the money starts coming in.

All this and more is explained in my book, New Path to Riches.

Buy New Path to Riches from Booklocker.com (also available as e-book)

Buy New Path to Riches from Amazon.com.

The bottle of cheap wine has its advantages. It can take the edge off the day. Relax you. Make you feel that all is good in the universe.

In the morning you may find yourself running for the coffee a little more urgently than usual. But more or less a feel-good experience.

And it will only cost you $14.95.

Or you could buy my book, curl up on the sofa, and discover that by spending an hour a day you can write your own money-making website.

After a while you could be earning a few hundred dollars a month. Then maybe thousands of dollars a month. All of it passive income. Best of all, you’ll be picking a topic for your website that interests you, so that hour a day will feel more like a hobby than work.

The bottle or the book? Well, if you buy the book (also just $14.95), you’ll soon be earning enough extra money to buy a much better bottle of wine.

Win/Win.

Buy New Path to Riches from Booklocker.com (also available as e-book)

Buy New Path to Riches from Amazon.com.

I’m a little shy of investing my head-earned money in stocks and bonds. In fact, I don’t even trust a third party to “look after” my money.

If the meltdown over the last 18 months has taught us anything, it’s that we are not in control of our wealth when we invest it in stocks and bonds. Bad things can and do happen.

But…I’m not in the least nervous about investing a little time in my own websites.

Let’s take a look at my best-performing website so far, CoffeeDetcetive.com.

Back in 2006 I spent quite a bit of time on research and getting the first twenty pages written and online.

Since then, I spend maybe one or two hours a week on the site. That’s nothing. It’s the time we spend on watching a couple of TV shows.

But today that site earns me close to $50,000 a year in revenue.

And that’s not all. A website with a proven track record of revenues is also quite easy to sell. A site like mine could sell for two or three times its annual earnings. That’s $100,000 or $150,000 dollars.

That’s a pretty good return on two or three hours a week doing something I enjoy anyway.

That’s as asset. Like a house or a retirement fund.

In any event, I won’t sell the site. I’ll rather keep adding new pages and increasing my monthly earnings.

Do you think you can beat that kind of return by investing a portion of your hard-earned salary? I doubt it.

Instead of investing money, invest a little of your time. And make you site about a topic that already interest you. Do that, and adding more and more pages feels more like a hobby than work.

If this sounds interesting to you, you’ll love my book, New Path to Riches.

Buy New Path to Riches from Booklocker.com (also available as e-book)

Buy New Path to Riches from Amazon.com.

When I talk with people about writing their own money-making websites, they often tell me they simply don’t have the time.

Then I ask them a sneaky question: How many hours a day do you spend watching TV?

Let’s say you’re not a complete TV fiend and spend only three hours a day watching the box. And let’s say that one of those three hours is spent watching a rerun of a show you have seen before.

Why not skip the rerun and spend that time writing a website that will pay you back in cash, month after month and year after year?

That’s the thing about the model described in my book, New Path to Riches. It’s not like launching a new product or service, or even starting a business. You don’t have to put a vast amount of time into the project before you have anything to show. You simply get started and then write the site one page at a time.

This is a long and easy walk, not a frantic sprint.

Maybe you first publish the site with a total of fifteen pages. Your site is up and running, and worth visiting.

From that point on you simply add pages as and when you have time. And if you use an hour of your TV time each day, you will have time to add a new page each day. Even allowing for a few skipped days, that’s over 300 pages by the end of the first year.

300 pages of great content on the topic you’re writing about. 300 pages for Google to find. 300 pages on which you can place AdSense ads or affiliate links. In other words, after a year, you’ll have 300 pages which will be generating you a monthly income.

Now add a second year, and so on.

Even after that first year you’ll be able to look back and say, “Wow, instead of watching so much TV, I have created a long-term asset which will pay me a monthly income indefinitely.”

The same applies if you spend hours a day playing World of Warcraft, FarmVille or any other online games. Can you spare an hour? If you can, you’ll have the opportunity to make yourself a significant second income.

Buy New Path to Riches from Booklocker.com (also available as e-book)

Buy New Path to Riches from Amazon.com.

There are one-to-one media…like telephones.

There are one-to-many media…like newspapers. (One publisher, with many readers.)

And then there is the first many-to-many medium, on a global basis, the Web.

During its first fifteen years the Web took baby steps towards its promise as a many-to-many medium. Traditional media built big sites online, in the hope that the Web was simply another one-to-many medium they could control.

Sadly for them, that isn’t the case.

The growth of social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter has accelerated the evolution of the Web’s true nature…as a many-to-many medium.

There are now a billion of us online, worldwide. More and more we ignore big media websites and, instead, connect with one another, learn from one another and listen to recommendations and warnings from one another.

The natural outcome of this shift in attention, from big media to each other, is that big media sites online will become increasingly irrelevant.

So who will the new media be? It will be you, and me, and a billion other people online, connected 24/7.

And that is very good news for those of us who have created our own information websites on topics that interest us.

As an example, with my own website, CoffeeDetective.com, my role is not to provide the final word as an expert. I’m not an industry expert, I’m just someone who knows more about coffee than most.

My position as an expert-next-door fits perfectly within the web as a many-to-many environment. My visitors don’t want to seek out some big industry website about coffee. They would rather connect with me. Why? Because I’m not a big company. I’m not an inaccessible expert. I don’t write in the language of coffee professionals. And I do answer questions people ask through my site.

In other words, I’m just a regular web user, like my visitors. I’m part of the many-to-many.

As social media continues to grow the connections between individuals online, the opportunity for people to write their own money-making websites on topics that interest them increases.

In a many-to-many environment we want to learn from each other, not from big media.

This is the opportunity you will find explored in my book, New Path to Riches.

Buy New Path to Riches from Booklocker.com (also available as e-book)

Buy New Path to Riches from Amazon.com.

If you want to make money by creating a content-rich website of your own, you have to find a niche with potential.

You can’t simply pick a site topic out of the air, start writing and expect to make money.

In fact, the more time you spend on the research of your topic, the more likely it is that you will end up with a winning website.

Step Number 1: Choose a topic that interests YOU.

It makes sense to pick a topic that interests you, because you’ll be spending a lot of time developing, writing and marketing your website. If the subject doesn’t interest you at all you’ll find it hard summoning up the enthusiasm to write enough on the topic.

Keep in mind that if you want an information site to generate a good monthly revenue, you will likely have to write hundreds of pages. You can lighten the burden by having your readers contribute content, but you’ll need to write the first hundred pages yourself.

Don’t be discouraged by that number. Once you get started, it’s surprisingly easy.

But you do have to ask yourself two questions.

1) Is this a topic about which it is possible to write hundreds of pages?

2) Will it interest me to write these pages, or will I be bored after the first ten?

Step Number 2: Choose a topic that people feel passionate about.

It’s much easier to engage the attention of your readers if you are writing about a topic that people feel passionate about.

What do I mean by that? Well, think about what you and your friends like to do AFTER you get home from work. Think about hobbies, sports, entertainment and so on.

As a rule, it is our after-work activities that we get the most excited about. This is why people flock to sites about cooking, baseball, kids’ parties, wine, music, gardening and more.

This isn’t a rule. You can create a very successful site about work-related topics too. But I always look first at hobbies and other after-work interests. It’s great to have a passionate audience for your website.

Step Number 3. Choose a niche that has high demand and low supply.

This is the most important step in choosing the topic for your money-making weekend website.

The easiest way to run a profitable website is to have all your visitors arriving through the major search engines. In other words, you want free, organic search engine traffic.

To make it to the first page of the major search engines for your principal page keywords and phrases, you need to find a niche topic for which there is high demand from searchers, but not too much in the way of quality supply from existing websites.

There are many tools you can use to help you find the best keywords. One of my own favorites is Wordtracker.

Perhaps the easiest way to get started in finding a high demand/low supply topic is to think in terms of sub-niches. That is to say, instead of choosing “wine” as your topic, explore niche areas like “organic wine”, “ice wines” or “Mediterranean wines”.

You CAN decide to go head-to-head with existing, quality sites on a top-level topic like wine, baseball or Hollywood. But you’ll find it much easier to succeed with your site by focusing on a sub-niche.

Next steps?

Once you have a great site topic it’s time to work on creating compelling content for your website.

Buy New Path to Riches from Booklocker.com (also available as e-book)

Buy New Path to Riches from Amazon.com.