Passive Income Update For August 2008

Finally got some time to add up all the passive income for the month of August. While June was a record breaking month with over $3,300 in passive income, July and August have been pretty lackluster in comparison. July’s income was $2,115.61 and August’s total was hardly any better with $2,134.57.

Maybe I can use the same excuse that government statistians use when talking about the economy and blame on seasonal variations! But the fact is that revenue dropped due to 2 main reasons. I pre-sold annual advertising in June that rightly should have been ammortized over the year (according to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles). Also, since I was busy with my move to Los Angeles, I didn’t really have time to look for advertisers or respond in a timely fashion to those that contacted me.

But the good news is that traffic to the site didn’t drop off, and apart from direct advertisers, revenue that was dependent on traffic remained almost constant. And of course, my dividend income was pretty stable despite the recent large drop in equity prices and the strengthening dollar which caused a 5-8% drop in the value of my foreign dividends.

Here’s the breakdown:

A reader emailed me a few days ago asking what’s the best way to start generating online income. I told him to start blogging about something he was passionate about. That way, he’d be able to keep up his motivation during the initial few months when he probably wouldn’t be making any money. Once he had written a few dozen articles or posts, he should start seeing some search engine traffic. If you’re in a highly competitive niche, you’ll need to make sure you have a lot of other sites linking back to you. Do a search for creating a back-link campaign to find out how to do this.

Once you see search engine traffic you should include ads in your site.  I include ads from Comission Junction, Adsense, Linkworth, Text-Link-Ads, ADSDAQ and Kontera. While individually they aren’t significant amounts, the income is consistent and together it all ads up.

Amazon affiliate income has dropped a lot since the beginning of this year. Not sure if this is seasonal since there are more sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but I’ve finally gotten around to adding an affiliate link prominently on the site and I expect this to have a positive effect. How much of a positive effect remains to be seen.

The affiliate income from Ebay has been growing steadily. It’s up nearly 7-fold in the past 5 months. Last month I added a storefront on this website which focuses on business, cheap real estate, gold coins and other income producing ventures and this has already started producing referrals. Some of the other sites are .info sites that I bought for $0.99 from GoDaddy and they were created using BANS. For a little more info on how to generate passive income from sites, look at the 2nd half of this post (look for the section on Niche Sites).

RevResponse did well last month, partly due to a $50 bonus. They basically provide free publications and white papers on various topics ranging from finance and banking to search engine optimization and car detailing. Check out the Free Financial Magazines link. Bloggers might also want to check out the Sales & Marketing articles too. Mature programmers might remember a famous programming magazine called Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Well, it’s available for free too. And the best part is I get paid for providing my readers with free useful information! Yes, you can  money selling magazines! (well, technically you’re giving them away).

A lot of oil and gold stocks have been beaten down recently. My portfolio of Canroys wasn’t spared either, but I’m not going to panic and sell them right now. I’m getting a decent amount of dividends each month and I’m happy to keep on holding them for a while. We’ve seen some pretty bizzare events in the financial markets lately and I’m sure not going to panic after everyone else already has (the time to panic is before everyone else!).

Anyway, its time to wind up this post. I have the last 6 hours of Math camp tomorrow! It’s a lot more fun than I thought it would be!

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