Linkworth’s New Referral Program

Linkworth is a site that offers bloggers and website owners the opportunity to monetize their site via paid ads.

Originally they only offered referral commissions for advertisers, but since July they’ve been tracking publisher referrals and will pay you for those too!

Advertiser Account Referrals
>> $25 payout once the advertiser spends a minimum of $100.00
>>5% payout on all recurring charges for the life of the advertiser account

Partner Account Referrals
>> $25 payout once the partner earns a minimum of $100.00

Combo Account Referrals
>> $25 payout once the advertiser side spends a minimum of $100.00
>> 5% payout on all recurring advertising charges for life of account
>> $25 payout once the partner side earns a minimum of $100.00

I made $144 last month from Linkworth, which is about 1/4th of my monthly online revenue, which I discussed here. If you haven’t signed up for it already, you can do so via this link.

How To Make An Easy $25 & Other Blog Monetizing Tips

AuctionAds is running a promotion. Just sign up to display Auction ads on your site and you’ll get $25. Not only that, if you refer anyone, you get 5% of their income for the first 6 months too.

It takes less than 5 minutes to sign up and you can modify the code to suite the layout of your site. You can also mention which keywords you’d like to target so that you get relevant ads (Note: this does NOT interfere with Google Ads). Somehow it integrates with Ebay’s affiliate program and you earn a referral fee anytime you sign up a new user or someone wins an auction after clicking on your link.

If you sign up a new ebay user, you get $25. If you generate a sale, you get 50% or more of the commission that Ebay makes. Since ebay has increased its fees and commission structure in the past year, this bodes well for publishers like us.

So what are you waiting for? If you haven’t already signed up, claim your free $25 right now!

AuctionAds is actually a sub-division of Text Link Ads, which also offers bloggers an opportunity to make money by selling ads on their site. If you haven’t signed up for Text Link Ads, I suggest that you do that as well. [continued below ad]




You might be wondering if its worth putting up all these ads? After all, your site might not be attracting a lot of traffic and you may not feel the income is worth the effort.

I actually do not get a lot of traffic (less than 10,000 hits per month), especially compared to entertainment-related blogs or blogs about getting out of debt, but the traffic that I do get is highly targeted and results in high dollar-value conversions. As a result I’m still currently pulling in between $400-500 per month.

I’m making money from various different sources so that if the guidelines change for one, it doesn’t completely stop the income. Also, over 50% of my traffic is organic in nature, coming mostly from Google.com searches.

Here are the various programs (in no particular order)

  • Google Adsense
  • Not only do you make money when people click on the sites, but you also get $5 per publisher who signs up. If they earn $100 in the first 6 months, you get an bonus $250! If you’re lucky enough to sign up 25 such publishers in a year, you get an extra $2,000!


  • Linkworth
  • Linkworth enables you to get sponsors who pay a flat fee to host ads on your ads. They have 2 programs, one with a 50-50 split and another with a 70-30 split. I’d recommend going with the 70-30 split. Get your own sponsors here.

  • Text Link Ads
  • Similar to Linkworth, they also let you sell ad space. The also allow a post-level sponsorship, but this is difficult to incorporate into Blogger.com. If however, you’re using wordpress then you’re in luck and this might be a better option for you. For advertisers, they’re running a promotion where you get $100 in FREE Links.

  • Amazon’s Affiliate Program
  • This is a pretty good program since a lot of people use it anyway. I make enough to buy myself a few books every month myself! So this effectively subsidizes my voracious reading habit. And by setting up an my online bookstore, I don’t have to repeatedly send people a list of my favorite books, plus I get a referral if they actually buy any of my recommendations.

  • Prosper.com
  • This is a new and somewhat temporary referral program. If a new lender signs up, you both get $25. If a new borrower joins, you get $125! I’ve made nearly $200 bucks from this referral program (which I haven’t included in my total, since its a temporary program).


    Great Rates, No Banks. Borrow. Lend. Prosper.

  • Direct Sponsors
  • I’m often contacted directly by sponsors wanting to put up ads. Many bloggers don’t make it easy for sponsors to contact them by not having comments enabled and not having any email address or website-ownership info visible. They’re missing out on potential revenue. I’ve had internet marketing companies as far away as the UK and Israel send me money via paypal for text ads. If you’re interested, you can send me an email at emptyspacesinc@gmail.com

While $500 isn’t enough to live on (atleast not in the US), its one of several income streams that I’m trying to develop. I’ll try to post a monthly update on the passive income growth in future.

How To Start A Vending Machine Business

If you’ve ever wondered how much money the vending machine guy at your office makes, here’s an excellent post by GeniusTypes on how he got into the vending machine business.

It all started with having an open mind and buying a route from someone who had lost interest for well below what it was worth.

You’ll see this theme repeated in many successful investment stories.

Every so often you’ll see ads in the local paper about the company that sells large office-type vending machines holding a presentation. Apparently, the charge $1000 each and it takes a long time to recoup your investment. Most of the buyers give up and sell them for $100-$200 each and the second owner usually has better luck.

GeniusTypes kept his initial investment low by understanding how to value the business to begin with. He thus guaranteed his success by keeping a large margin of safety. He was constantly following sales of vending machines and vending routes on ebay and when he saw a good deal, he pounced on it.

He immediately saw where he could cut costs to increase his net income. He also followed up on some leads and expanded his route and thus the value of his business.

Also note how he takes the positive aspects from Robert Kiyosaki’s books and doesn’t dwell on whether the book is based on fact or fiction. That’s an important virtue in successful people – they don’t spend too much time maligning others, they just focus on getting their own work done.

Click on this link if you’d like to see what vending machines and coin-operated business are selling for.

Living off dividends [or how to invest in Real Estate for cashflow]

While surfing onlne, I came across this blog post: Real Estate as an asset class.

Basically this guy wants to be able to live off his dividends at some point and his blog is devoted to that. He’s wondering how real estate fits in. He invests in REITS but isn’t too sure about actual investing in Real Estate.

Well here’s the skinny on investing in Real Estate for cashflow.

You definitely want to buy in an area thats reasonably priced.

  1. How do you define reasonable? As a rule of thumb, the monthly rents are 1% or higher of the purchase price. for example, if you’re buying a $90,000 house and the rent is $900 per month or more, thats a reasonable price.
  2. You want to make sure that after paying for property management, utilities, taxes, insurance and maintenance the rent still covers the mortgage. You may need to learn how to do this. I strongly recommend reading What every Investor Needs to Know About Cashflow.
  3. Make sure you figure out the return on investment, or as I like to call it, the Cash on Cash return. for example, if you put down $5,000 and cashflow $125/mo, thats an annualized return of 30%. These are actual figures.I’ve also done better. It sure beats the stock market!
  4. Make sure your know how to get the best mortgage for your goals. I recommend this excellent book: How to Save Thousands of Dollars on Your Home Mortgage

Make sure you’re making atleast $125 over your expenses or you’ll be negative on the cashflow. I usually want atleast 16% cash on cash return for properties that are in appreciating states like Utah. If there in states which dont experience much appreciation I shoot for atleast 30% Cash on Cash, which isn’t difficult to get at all.

here’s an example:
I invested 4.5k to purchase a 90k 3/2/2 house in a city in the midwest.(4.5k is 5%. i added in closing costs to price which the seller paid)

monthly rent = $945 (1050 less a 10% vacancy)
mortgage payment = $517.5(1st at 6.5% interest only and second at 8.5% interest only)
taxes = $120
maintence = $50
property mgmt = $110 (i’m generous)
insurance = $40

cashflow = $147.5
annual cashflow = $1,770
Cash on cash return = 44% (thats 1.770/4,500*100)

Note, this is a theoretical cash on cash scenario. Often times, significant vacancies or repairs will trash these numbers. Make sure you don’t over-leverage and have sufficient reserve funds.

A lot of people think dealing with tenants is stressful. It is. Thats why you don’t want to be cheap. Always hire competent property management. You should still cashflow after including this expense.