Tag Archives: alternative income

Ebay Bought Me A Laptop!

Posted on by Nirav
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hp-DV6series-16-inch-intel-core-2-duo-laptop

Check out the new laptop I got courtesy of Ebay.com! No, I didn’t buy a laptop on ebay, but I did use the money ebay sent me to buy a really nice notebook. You can learn more about the configuration of the 16 inch intel core 2 duo HP laptop here. With the recession going on and unemployment soaring, its nice have someone sending me a few dollars now and then for my discrentionary purchases.

As I reported previously, I’ve made around $15,000 in the first 6 months of the year through various online income streams. Last month was no exception. I’ll report the exact amount later, but again ebay was a major portion of this number. I won’t know the exact amount until Saturday but so far it’s just over $1,000. I’ve outlined the steps to create ebay income, but if that’s too technical for you, you might want to check out this new program called NicheDevil that looks very promising. It comes with a 60 day refund policy so there’s no downside. If you are unable to make any money online with it, just get your money back. The creator is the same guy who turned me on to BANS which has made me $10,000 so far so I’m more than happy to throw a few dollars his way to check out the product.

Is anyone else making money selling real estate, sports cars or gold coins on ebay or through BANS? If so let me know your success stories!

Update: I bought NicheDevil and I set up a few sites with NicheDevil. While it took me considerably longer than the 36 seconds advertised it was a considerably easier than setting up a comparable BANS site. I also liked the automatic pulling of tweets, youtube  videos and images based on your target keywords. The only drawback was I had to get HostGator hosting. I used the online chat help and asked if they had any current promotions – they said they had a 20% discount with the code “Beach” so I used that to get Baby hosting which cost $95/year for unlimited domains. I still actually prefer Dreamhost but they didn’t support the installation of IonCube loader so I had to use HostGator instead (well, I didn’t have to but I’m too busy to figure out how to install it myself). I also bought a few domains from 1and1.com since they offer free private registration and currently have .com domains for $6.99!

Overall, it was a quick and easy setup. The sites look pretty good. I downloaded GIMP and made some minor modifications to the layout of the site (just background color and header image which I borrowed from someone else!). I’ll let everyone know how they work out.

December 2008 Passive & Alternative Income Update

Posted on by Nirav
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I just ran the totals for passive income for December and I found out that it was the 3rd most “profitable” month of 2008.  The other two were October and June.

Monthly Passive (alternative, online & dividend) Income was $3,276.07.

The total online income was $2385.20 which broke the previous record by ~$130.

Here’s the breakdown of the $3,276.07:

Online Income:$2385.2

Dividend/Alternate Income: $890.87

The largest segment was the income from Ebay which was over $900, probably due to Christmas. Over the course of 2008, I made a total of $3332.55 from the Ebay sites. Adding a storefront on this site has helped boost this income.  The store targets people who want to buy online businesses, cheap real estate and timeshares, gold coins and other income producing ventures.

In another post, I’ll list the total income for 2008 and a break-down by category.

Online Income and Passive Dividend Income Update for September

Posted on by Nirav
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I made $2,884.13 in online & passive income for the month of September, 2008. After the somewhat lackluster income over summer, this was a welcome increase.

Here’s the breakdown:

The affiliate income from Ebay has been growing steadily. It’s more than doubled from August and the total revenue for this year is $1847.67. I think that’s a pretty good return for a little bit of effort (most of which took place in May). In July I added a storefront on this website which focuses on business, cheap real estate, gold coins and other income producing ventures. I recently added a Ferrari and Sports-car for sale page. I don’t expect to sell any Ferraris’ or Lamborghinis’ but I sure enjoy looking at them!

Some of the other ebay affiliate sites are .info sites that I bought .info domains for $0.99 from GoDaddy and created them using BANS software, which automatically pulls the relevant content from Ebay. They’re all hosted on Dreamhost, for which I pay $110/year for unlimited domains. Dreamhost is currently running a special, where you get four times the usual disk-space and bandwidth! Also if you prepay for 5 years you get $150 off.  Use one of the promo codes below at Dreamhost:

333373609023
986060012222
593944613024
436480227416
972055933830

Note: Setting up BANS on Dreamhost requires a little bit of tweaking. If you’re not very familiar with setting up websites then I strongly suggest using HostGator for your hosting. They cost about the same and have pretty good compatibility with the BANS software.

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).

For more info on the other online sources of income, check out my previous passive income updates.

Last month was a massacre for my oil and gold stocks. One of them, Tortoise Energy (TYY) was trading under $6/share for a brief period and yielding 36%!. Unfortunately, I missed the buying window and it’s now trading over $15 again. TYY is an American MLP (Master Lease Partnership); dividends are counted as return of principle making them tax-free!

Anyway, its time to wind up this post. I have 3 midterms next week.

Earn Passive Income From Domains

Posted on by Nirav
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Is it possible to earn passive income for domains? Absolutely!  It isn’t rocket science but it does involve a little bit of work. Here are the simple steps:

1. Buy a cheap domain name.

2. Decide how you’re going to monetize it. Either through ads on a niche site, affiliate sales, or domain parking.

3. Get up and actually do the work.

Buying Cheap Domains

GoDaddy currently has a great promotion on .info domains. They’re currently selling for only $0.99 instead of the usual $9 dollars. That’s about 90% off the regular price, and I spent the past several days getting about 15 domains that I think I might be able to monetize in some form or the other.

People might feel more comfortable or might more easily remember .com domains, but if you’re targeting search engine traffic it probably shouldn’t matter very much. A lot of the domains have dashes in them (example Sterling-Silver-Rings.info, but again, for visitors coming from a search engine it shouldn’t matter too much.

I also got a few domains that I think are pretty cool like Discount Ipod.info, Discount Seiko Watches.info and Cheap iPod Batteries.info.A good domain name has highly relevant keywords in it. How do you find these relevant keywords? Try using a search tool like Keyword Elite. It’ll save you a ton of time in research.


Niche Sites

The most common way of profiting from a niche site, is creating a lot of content around a keyword or an idea and putting ads around it.  If you can create a lot of unique content around a topic and attract a lot of visitors, you should be able to easily monetize it through Google Adsense or Text-Link-Ads or LinkWorth.

One way I’m thinking of profiting from them is through building a niche store (BANS). I already have an account with Dreamhost and I can host unlimited domains with them without any extra cost. You either set up an Amazon store or an Ebay store and make referral income off the sales. That’s a great way to produce residual income if you can make it work.

If you’re facing problems installing the BANS software on Dreamhost, check out this guide: How To install BANS on Dreamhost.

These are both great ways to produce residual passive income from a few hours of work. It might take a few months ramp up, but they should both add to my passive income.

If you’d like to buy a revenue generating website check out my business and investment store.

Update: September 18th 2008

Looks like my ebay-affiliate stores should pull in over $500 this month! The income has been going up every single month, while the effort has almost dropped off! That’s a pretty nice residual income stream.

However, if you’re too lazy to create content, then you might want to consider domain parking.

Affiliate Sales

This is by far the most profitable strategy and also the most work! You figure out how to drive traffic to  a site and how to get people to part with their money either by buying a 3rd-party product or something you’ve developed yourself.  I know guys who make over $100,000 a year doing this. It isn’t exactly passive but the hourly rate is insanely high if you know what you’re doing. I know of one guy who makes the equivalent ofi $5,000 an hour from his affiliate sites.

Here’s an example of an affiliate site that sells a very interesting product. Its a system that teaches to make money selling stuff! Here’s an example of a site that sells a product they developed themsleves.

Domain Parking

Another way I’m thinking of monetizing them is through Domain Parking. Many companies offer domain parking, including Sedo, GoDaddy and even Google. However, what they usually do is just put up ad links on your site. Unless people are directly typing in the address of your site into the browser you are unlikely to see any traffic or revenue.

A better way is to use a company like Why Park? They will automatically generate content for your sites and update it on a regular basis. The resulting site with fresh content is much more likely to get indexed in the search engines and get organic traffic (that’s traffic from search engines) and thus you are more likely to actually see some revenue.

Monthly Passive Income Crosses $2,000 Mark!

Posted on by Nirav
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I’ve finally broken the $2,000/month in passive income! Passive income for February 2008 was $2,383.55. Not bad considering I wasn’t even in the country!

Here’s the breakdown:

  • Online Income: $$1399.29
  • Savings Accounts: $138.43
  • Real Estate Trust Deed: $0
  • Direct Oil Drilling Investment: $277
  • Dividends from Canroys: $509.11
  • Other Dividends: $59.72

As usual, I ignored any income from Prosper loans. I did however include the $100 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 still offering a $25 incentive to new members.

Canadian government takes its 15% tax on the dividends from Canroys, so the income is after-tax. You get a tax credit for this amount in the US so there’s no double taxation.

I’m also getting affiliate referral income from Linkworth.com. For every person that signs up, they give 5% of the income they earn for life! The $200 that I got in February was actually the income I earned in January. For February, I’ve actually earned $410.98, of which most of it is referrral income. But since I won’t get paid until March, I’m going to count that next month. Linkworth will probably be the largest income stream next month. Its a great way to boost your site’s revenue.

The Kontera income dropped 44% from last month. I haven’t spent much time analyzing that so I’m not sure what happend. Overall traffic is up so I’d expect the kontera revenue to also increase, but the opposite occurred. I guess it is correlated with the type of posts. I’ve seen that posts related to gold do very well for PayPerClick advertising.

As I mentioned last month, my real estate trust deed has defaulted. Luckily, the oil drilling programs have started to kick-in and have almost replaced that income.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with the results. Hopefully, I’ll be able to break the $3,000/month barrier pretty soon.

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.