Monthly Passive Income Finally Breaks $3,000 Barrier!

A few of my readers have emailed me asking when I’m going to post the Passive Income numbers for June. Apologies for the delay; I’m going to be starting my full-time MBA at UCLA pretty soon and I’ve had to look for apartments in Los Angeles so I’ve been pretty busy since the beginning of this month.

As reported earlier, April was a been a record breaking month for me with total “passive” income amounting to $2,811.42. I haven’t posted May’s break-down but it was a lot lower at $2,330.00.

However, June’s income has broken all previous records and was a whopping $3,354.51! I’ve finally attained my goal of $3,000/month in passive (or semi-passive) income. Let’s hope I can maintain it!

This is a strong 19.6% jump against my previous monthly high in April. Since I’ve been neglecting my sites this month, I expect July income to again drop significantly. But the number of sites that I’ve created is increasing every month, so hopefully it’ll all balance out eventually.

Here’s the breakdown:

The biggest jump in income came from direct advertisements and from the oil drilling programs. I expect both to dip next month.

Adsense, Linkworth, Text-Link-Ads, ADSDAQ and Kontera have been consistent earners for me. It really isn’t a lot of income but its consistent and together it all ads up.

Amazon affiliate income hasn’t really taken off and to be honest I haven’t really been doing anything to boost it. Hopefully, I’ll be able to devote more time to this.

The affiliate income from Ebay has been growing steadily. My Discount iPod-iPhone and Gold Coin Store have started seeing some traffic. These sites are .info sites that I bought for $0.99 from GoDaddy and it was created using BANS. For a little more info on how to generate passive income from sites, look at the 2nd half of this post.

In March, I made $60 from Domain Embarking, a site that helps you earn money from parked domains. Since they only pay out quarterly, I was supposed to get a payment in the end of June, but they got booted from the Google Adsense program (for unknown reasons) and suspended all payments until end of September. Apparently I’ve made another $63.15 with them, but until I see the next payment, I’m ignoring it. Until then, I’ll continue to use their services as its a great way to create automated content, traffic and boost page ranking. Members can now place their own adsense or affiliate ads on the pages of sites parked with Domain Embarking. Make sure you at least put up your affiliate ads.

I’m not sure if Prosper is still handing out $25 signup bonuses to new lenders and but I do know that the referral program is changing. I may no longer get any money from referrals, so thats one income stream that is likely to dry up. But I’ll still keep investing through the site. Here’s a good post on How Not To Bid On Prosper.

To help make up for Prosper’s anticipated drop, a new program RevResponse has been added. 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. Old School programmers might remember 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! So if you’ve ever wondered if you can make money selling magazines, here’s your chance to find out without getting off out of your chair. They’re also paying $50 for writing a 200 word post about them this month, so you should definitely join immediately if you’re a blogger.

I also made around $1,099 from some oil investments and other dividends. Some of the stocks pay over 10% in annual dividends. In the past 2 weeks the market has taken a beating and there are a lot of stellar companies paying over 4% annual yield. Some of them are Verizon(VZ), General Electric (GE) and Pfizer (PFE). Even stocks like McDonalds (MCD) are yielding 2.6% which is more than you get in your savings account!

Last month I bought a few more domains like Hobby Rubber Stamps and Invasion TV from GoDaddy. GoDaddy currently has a promotion – .com domain purchases for only $6.99 and .info domains for only 99 cents. I’ll try a few ways to monetize these domains over the next few months and hopefully they’ll add to my passive income as well.

I have multiple streams of both online & offline income. As I’ve mentioned before, having small amounts of income from various companies provides diversity and risk management. Occasionally, one of them will drop off (like adsense went from $400 a month to $150), and not being too concentrated in it prevents your passive income totally disappearing.

I’ll end with a quote from last months post:

Having any sort side income that sufficiently large to allow you to pay the rent and put food on the top is a great stress reliever. It also provides you F*** YOU money, in case you don’t see eye-to-eye with your boss or you feel that your job is sucking the life out of you! For stubborn and opinionated people, having F-U money is awesome!

I hope I’ve inspired all of you to try and boost your passive income or maybe add new sources to increase your current income streams. Please let me know how you’re all doing.