Category Archives: Passive Income

Supplement Your Adsense Revenue!

Posted on by Nirav
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I started using Kontera‘s pay-per-click (PPC) contextual advertising program in December. Last month I made $92.11 from it. The revenue is directly proportional to the traffic and also is also somewhat correlated to the type of content.

Finance-related content usually results in above average per-click amounts. However, content about Paris Hilton might pay 1/10th of the amount, but you typically get 10 times more traffic, so don’t fret if you niche is low paying. Just focus on creating good content. My experience has been that the per-click amount is lower than Adsense but its a good complimentary service that runs along-side Adsense, and it doesn’t violate Google’s TOS (terms of service).

Google used to prohibit publishers from using other contextual advertising programs in conjunction with Adsense, but they’ve recently eased this to allow programs that do not have the same look and feel.

My Kontera revenue is currently only 1/4th that of the Adsense revenue. However, since my Adsense revenues have been growing, Kontera doesn’t seem to be cannibalizing its revenue, so its all gravy!

Its very easy to implement and I’ve received excellent customer as well as technical support from them.

Even if you’ve never you considered monetizing your site, you should definitely try it out. For less than an hour’s work, an extra $1000 a year is definitely worth it!

January’s Online Income Grows 36.92%

Posted on by Nirav
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Since I’m still in India, I’m not really sure what some of my income checks are for the month of January. But I do know my online income, so I might as well provide that.

Last month I made $568.55 in online income from various sources. January’s online income rose by 36.92% to $778.

Even though Prosper Referrals were down, I referred over 30 new members in January. It can take between 60-90 days to get the referral so I’m optimistic that this number will be higher next month.

Adsense revenue was up nearly 50% and is now the largest individual contributor to my alternative income (both online and offline). While I don’t know if the increase will continue, I hope I can atleast maintain this level.

Linkworth was also up 15% this month. Two new publishers joined the program through my referral link so february’s income should be atleast 25% higher. I’ll also get 5% of the income they generate for life! I strongly recommend their program for text link ads. Bloggers also can get paid to write posts, but I haven’t signed up for this.

Kontera has been growing nicely. As my blog gets more traffic, this number should increase proportionately. I’m also part of their affiliate program (they’re really picky about accepting people into it) so hopefully, that’ll generate some income too.

January’s sleeper success was Amazon’s affiliate program ( in terms of percentage growth, not overall dollar amount). I’ve made more than 50% what I made for the entire last year. Hopefully, as I learn more about affiliate marketing, I can boost this portion of my online income.

While I’m no John Chow, who made $30k in January, I’m happy with the progress I’ve made so far. For the month of February, I expect my online income to break the $1,000 barrier.

How Not To Bid On Prosper

Posted on by Nirav
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Micro-lending is one of my 20 passive income streams. I currently have 45 loans on Prosper.com, lent out at an average rate of 19.55%. Even though I’ve had a few delinquencies, my capital has grown 14.5% in the 15 months I’ve been a lender. I’ve learnt a few things about lending and how to protect your principle. While I won’t explain how to lend money on prosper, I will explain how not to lend money!!

Here are the Top Ten Worst reasons to lend money to borrowers:

  1. You think they’re hot!
  2. You feel sorry for them.
  3. They have a picture of a cute kitten or puppy (or supermodel) in their profile.
  4. They’re 95 and need money for medical bills.
  5. They’re a Californian real estate investor and are willing to pay 20% interest for a remodel.
  6. They need $25,000 for college and are willing to 25% interest for it.
  7. They’re terminally ill and need a new fridge.
  8. They look like they’re 65 and are smoking in their photograph.
  9. They make $200,000 a year and need to borrow $5,000.
  10. They’re buying a business and want borrow the 20% down-payment.

So far I’ve had a really good experience with micro-lending on Prosper. Prosper also has a new tool that automatically calculates the estimated chance of loss based on several criteria like the the borrowers credit and number of delinquencies. That gives you a good idea of what minimum interest to charge to overcome your losses.

If you’re interested in signing up, Prosper is offering a $25 incentive to new lenders.

$1921.11 In Passive Income For December ’07!

Posted on by Nirav
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My Passive income for December 2007 was $1,921.11.

Here’s the breakdown:

  • Online Income: $568.55
  • Savings Accounts: $128.47
  • Real Estate Trust Deed: $300
  • Direct Oil Drilling Investment: $163
  • Dividends from Canroys: $499.21
  • Other Dividends: $261.88

As usual, I ignored any income from Prosper loans. I did however include the $75 in referrals fees. If you’ve been thinking of lending or borrowing money on Prosper, now is a good time to do it. They’re offering a $25 incentive to new members.

Adsense revenue was down from last month, but since I wasn’t posting often due to my traveling, that was to be expected. Hopefully I can boost my online revenue this year. Once I’m done traveling, I should be able to focus more on this.

Traffic to the site has been increasing steadily every month, but until Google assigns it a pagerank I probably won’t get any direct sponsors.

The US Dollar has also strengthened against the Loonie in the past 6 weeks, so this has reduced the payout from my Canadian Royalty Funds. But I expect this trend to reverse and the dollar will continue weakening this year. On the other hand, I’m re-investing the dividends and so the number of shares and resulting dividends are slowly increasing.

I also expect interest rates to drop from the current 4%+ range to under 3% in 2008. But its only 6.6% of my passive income so that shouldn’t make too much of a difference.

The good thing is that the income is diversified across various investment classes and there are over 20 income streams. The largest source is the real estate trust deed which represents 15.6% of this month’s passive income. Even if the 4 largest income producers dry-up, I’m still going to be getting $1,200 per month. This is the best thing about having multiple streams of income.

Hopefully I’ll be able to cross the $2,000 mark soon and the $3,000 mark this year. (If the dollar becomes extremely weak against the Loonie, that’ll be much easier to achieve, but I hope the dollar doesn’t tank. Of course, unless Bernanke increases the interest rates, the dollar will not strengthen ).

November 2007 Passive Income Update

Posted on by Nirav
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I’m busy getting ready for my upcoming trip and also my business school applications so I’ll have to keep this short.

My passive income for November was $1,679.88. As expected it was slightly lower than last month. But some of the shortfall was made up by the purchase of some dividend generating stock in AAV and HTE in October. I also received a special 30% payout from the Korea fund, but I’m not counting that. I’m just counting the regular $13.00 dividend that it paid out.

Here’s a basic break down:

    Dividends/Interest: $611.01
  1. 2nd Trust Deeds/Direct Oil programs: $424.62
  2. Online income: $646.25

My online income also includes the $50 I received from Prosper.com referrals (sign up and get $25 free with a $50 deposit). It doesn’t include the interest I get from my Prosper loans but thats over $50 a month.

Adsense earning were up this month 36% to $262.50. I’m sure if I tweak the ad placement a little bit I can boost these earnings.

How was your passive income?

A Better Way To Earn Money From Parked Domains

Posted on by Nirav
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Until recently, domainers used to park domains with nothing but ads on them. They tried to get traffic from mis-spelt URLs or people who’d directly type a URL in the location bar. There wasn’t any content to attract the search engines, so unless they were paying to direct traffic to their site, the number of eyeballs was pretty low. However, if they did a good job of providing relevant links, the user was likely to click on them, if nothing else then atleast to get away from their site. I had several sites parked with Sedo.com and so far I’ve made $0.24 over a 2 year period! Pretty lousy way to park domains.

However, a site called Domain Embarking is trying to revolutionize the way domains are parked. Instead of putting up a site with nothing but ads, they’ve come upon an automated way to ad relevant content to your site.

Through their user-friendly dashboard, you can add your Domains (which may be registered elsewhere) and fill out 3 fields regarding keywords you’d like to target and the title. There’s a useful tool that tells you what the top searched keywords are for that title so you can modify your title to include them. There’s also a preview tool so you know what your site will look like beforehand.

Their content-generating tool automatically generates several pages worth of content for you with news clips, photos, a paragraph from wikipedia and ads from Google. Quite an innovative idea. Apparently search engines index these sites and visitors have been reported to bookmark them.

So compared to the old “spam sites” created by companies like Sedo, you get actual sites that people enjoy visiting. And if you’d like to spend more than the 60 seconds it takes to fill out the keyword and title details, you can go in advanced options and tweak some more fields and maybe add a paragraph of your own text.

Even their revenue share model is quite interesting. They keep 50% of the ad revenue and the members get the other 50%. Members earn Premiere Shares, which entitle you to a certain % of the profits. You get additional shares for each site you “embark” with them. According to their site, 1 Premiere Share entitled members to $15.11 during the last quarterly distribution. You also get Premiere Shares for referring new clients and their since service is free so you might as well get cracking!

They also provide web hosting and domain registration plans, but I prefer cheaper alternatives like 1and1.com for domain registering and Dreamhost for hosting (Use code DIVIDENDS and get free domain registration at Dreamhost).

As soon as I heard about Domain Embarking, I had to try it out. Opening an account took 1 minute and then I added my domain Cosmetic Forums, a site that I wanted to develop into a forum on plastic surgery but I’ve never had the time. Parked at Sedo, it was generating $0, it had no traffic and wasn’t even indexed. If you see the image, you’ll understand why. Lots of irrelevant ads.

Site Parked At Sedo

However, the new and improved Embarked version looks much better. There’s some static content (below the fold and thus not visible in the image below) and some dynamic images and videos that change every time you refresh the page. At the top of the page there are links to News and other pages. Click through and check it out. Its still not perfect, but considering it took only a 1 minute to create, its a thousand times better than the Sedo-parked page was.

Site Parked With Domain Embark

Now I’m satisfied with the results, I’ll be porting all my sites over to Domain Embark. Even if they don’t generate any traffic, they’ll get indexed and that will at least increase their resale value.

There is also another domain parking service called WhyPark? They charge a one time fee of $99.95 and similar to Domain Embarking, they also creates content-rich websites automatically. However, I haven’t tried it so I can’t really recommend how it works or whether its better than Domain Embarking.

Check out the investment and business store if you’d like to buy turnkey websites on various topics like real estate, cars, health, etc.

UPDATE : As of April 1st 2008, I’ve earned $60 this year, or around $20 per month. Compared to Sedo.com’s average of 1 cent per month, this is a much better result! Now that I’m making money, I can now declare that Domain Embarking’s free domain parking service is a better alternative to Sedo’s domain parking and probably even GoDaddy’s low cost domain parking. GoDaddy’s CashParking service has 2 packages ranging between $3.50 and $9.99 per month. Godaddy’s service cost is negligible for people who do domain parking in bulk quantities, but it doesn’t provide the automated text generation and so I don’t think there’s anyway to develop any sort of indexing.

Making $3,000/Month In Passive Income

Posted on by Nirav
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One of my near-term goals’ is to create $3,000 in passive income. (Since writing this post, I’ve broken that record. Check out this post to see how I made over $3,000 in a month) So far I’m about half way there, with income from various sources like blog advertisement revenue, Canadian Income funds and stock dividends,  and direct oil and gas drilling programs. Serial-blogger, Derek Beau, has already reached this target and his goal is to now make $10,000/month! Unlike me, he’s chosen to generate this income solely from blog ad revenue.

Over the past 2 years, he’s created 23 blogs on various topics ranging from golf balls to pregancy (apparently personal experience or expertise isn’t a deterrent!). He outsources the content creation using sites like Elance, and pays between $3-$5 per post. After waiting for a few months, during which time he lets the traffic build up, he begins to monetize it using various companies like Google, Text Link Ads, Kontera and direct advertizers . He’s making $3,000 every month and his eventual goal is to have 100 blogs pulling in $10k every month.

This isn’t by any means a unique or novel concept. However, I haven’t met anyone who actually have put in the effort to create so many sites and successfully monetize them.

Anand of TheAnand, has taken this automation one step further by suggesting that you can even automate blog posts by having google alerts send emails directly your blog auto-post email address! He even has a disease site on Avian Flu thats a really good example of a topic specific information site. I’m not sure what his traffic or conversion numbers are, but its still quite well implemented. [Updated note August 2009: I tried my hand at autoblogging and nearly got my adsense account shut down. It didn’t work for me. I’ve been able to create $3000/month in online income using other methods so make sure you go through all my posts!]

While creating 20+ blogs takes an awful lot of time and may not be possible for everyone, there are still ways to make passive income online.

This post describes two ways for you to earn passive income from your domains with a minimal amount of effort. If however, you’re interested in running a website that actually makes money passively by selling stuff, be sure you check out this link where you can buy existing online businesses.

October 2007 Passive Income Update

Posted on by Nirav
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It time for an update on October’s passive income and online earnings. Last month’s total was nice $1,736.80. Plus I got another $100 for referring a friend to TDAmeritrade, so counting that its $1836.80. I’m not counting the income from Prosper since its rather difficult to manually go through ~50 loans and find out how much I got. Besides it keeps getting re-invested in more loans anyway.

Here’s the break-down (not exactly JohnChow.com style, but informative nonetheless)

1. Online Income : $704.96

2. ING Savings: $98.44

3. Real Estate Trust Deed: $300

4. Direct Oil Drilling Investment: $115.63

5. Dividends from Canroys: $ 447.67

6. Other Dividends : $102.7

Total: $1,736.80

I just moved this site over from the Living Off Dividends site last month, and I expect the online revenue to drop quite a bit in November. This site doesn’t have any page-ranking yet and so isn’t attracting any advertisers. (I think its being penalized by Google for having 500 duplicate posts from the old site). Since the old site isn’t being updated, some advertisers have already dropped off from there. But it’s still getting decent organic traffic from Google, so its still pulling in decent adsense revenue (it’s eCPM is twice that of this site!) so I won’t be talking that site down any time soon!

The Canadian Dollar is also getting stronger than the US Dollar and with the dividend-reinvestment program, my Canroy dividends should increase slightly next month. The Federal Reserve cut the interest rates, so I expect my savings at ING to yield a quarter point less next month.

Adsense revenue was up 39% from the month before, so hopefully that trend will continue (who says social media marketing doesn’t work!). Otherwise I expect November’s revenue to be atleast 15% lower than this months. Eventually though this site should gain some more traction and the revenue should come back up again. Another one of my oil investments should start paying out in 2 months, so that should boost the income as well.

Buying A Stock For Its 16% Yield

Posted on by Nirav
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Since I decided to kick the old job (which was a hard habit to break), I’m going to be more reliant on my passive income. Part of my passive income comes from Canadian Income Funds, some of which pay out over 16% in annual yields. They pay out the dividends on a monthly basis and after tax (which the Canadian Government takes out at source) it still works out to over 1% per month. This is about 3 times what I get in my savings account!

Also, being enrolled in the dividend-reinvest program (also called DRIP) my dividends are used to buy more stock every month without paying a commission. Any best of all, some stocks offer a discount to the prevailing market price.

I added to my position in Harvest Energy Trust (HTE) yesterday. I calculated I have too much money in savings, even if I don’t have a job for the next year. So I decided to take a little bit of money (from my Bank of America account, which pays half a percent in interest) and buy something that yields 16.5% per year (just over 14% if you consider the Canadian Tax). While the monthly increase in my cashflow is not significant, its still a good optimization of my resources. And after all, leveraging and optimizing one’s resouces is how you get rich. Their DRIP offers a discount too.

If it drops a bit from here, then I’ll probably buy more, else I’ll buy Australian Currencyshares Trust (FXA), which pays out ~5.5% yield. If the Federal Reserve cuts the rate tomorrow and the Reserve Bank of Australia boosts it next week, we could see parity between the USD and AUD in fairly short order.

In the long run I think energy prices are heading higher and the USD is heading lower. Having the conviction to follow through with your beliefs is also an important factor to becoming rich. Either way, I’m pretty sure exchanging my USD for something else is a good idea.

Goodbye Cruel Job!

Posted on by Nirav
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Tomorrow is the last day at my job. I gave my notice 2 weeks ago.

No, I don’t have another job lined up.

No, I didn’t win the lottery.

No, I don’t have a back-up plan or any idea what I’m going to do next.

So why am I quitting? 

Because I don’t feel 100% committed. Not being fully committed isn’t fair to the company and it isn’t fair to me. Life is too short to be working at a job that you don’t love and aren’t willing to commit 110% too.

Besides, working for someone else will rarely make you rich. One of the reasons is that you get paid for the number of hours you put in. Having a finite number of hours is your limiting factor here. As an employee, you also pay the highest amount of tax since you have almost no tax deductions unlike business owners and the self-employed.

So I think the best option is to quit the job and refocus my long term goals and strategies. The best way to do this is when you’re totally relaxed and in a good mood. So in early December I’m going to Thailand and India for about 5 weeks.

Once I get back, I should be in a more clearer frame of mind to plan the next stage of my working career. I’m very keen on getting an MBA. It may not be the smartest decision financially, but its one of the things I’d definitely regret not pursuing.

Not having a job will free up my time to pursue other ventures. Like investing and writing about investing. And like MoominHouse, I may even take up trading as a side hobby.

My only concern is that either boredom or insecurity (about not having a steady paycheck) will set in and I’ll go back and get a job again!

In the meanwhile, I expect to make approximately $1,200/month from advertising revenue, trust deeds and dividends. While its not a lot, the wife’s income will supplant the short-fall. But it looks like I’ll be going from a job to literally “living off dividends!”.

Wish me luck!