October 2007 Passive Income Update

Posted on November 1, 2007 by Nirav

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.

Get Advertising Revenue From Prosper

Posted on October 25, 2007 by Nirav

I’ve been lending money on Prosper.com for nearly a year now. I’ve been getting a pretty decent rate of return, despite having had a couple of borrowers default.

I’ve also made over $200 from referrals fees! Whenever anyone signs up using the referral link and funds atleast $50, we both get $25. If a borrower signs up, I get $125.

And to add to that, Prosper is now a paid advertiser on my blog. Not only are they offering referrals rewards, but they’re also paying me to put their link up!

I guess they’ve had such success with the program that they can afford to be extremely generous. If you have a blog you can start making extra money by doing just 3 very simple things:

Sign up using this referral link.
Fund your account with $50 and lend it out. (ok, you don’t need to do this, but considering you get $25 almost immediately, where else are you going to get a 50% return on your money?)
Email me at livingoffdividends$$gmail.com (replace the $$ with @) with “prosper referral advertiser” in the subject field, and I’ll put you touch with the rep at Prosper.com

Not only will you get a check from Prosper for advertising, but you’ll still get the referral rewards too!

If you don’t have a blog, you can do steps 1 and 2 and get a referral link or an image button from Prosper.com which you can put in your email signature to generate some extra money.

Amazon Muscles In On Music

Posted on October 18, 2007 by Nirav

Amazon.com just announced that its opened its own MP3 Music Shop and its currently offering affiliates a whopping 20% commission on music sales.

I haven’t bought music for years (mainly because the music I listen to is from the 80s and 90s and I have all the albums) and I don’t even know anyone who buys music on a regular basis. (yeah, I’m getting old). But if you’re one of those people who buy music online, Amazon’s store looks pretty good. Most of the songs are $0.89 so you’re saving $0.10 per song. Maybe $0.10 doesn’t sound like much (and it isn’t) but it still represents a 10% saving off iTunes!

It doesn’t match Walmart.com’s $0.88, but Walmart won’t let users running any OS apart from Windows XP/Vista download music off their site. Amazon atleast lets everyone (including Mac and Linux users) buy and download music. I bought a “free” song on Linux, so I know it works. [Check out The Apples In Stereo: Energy].

They have a pretty wide collection, especially for new music. But while you can buy older albums like Bon Jovi’s ‘Slippery When Wet’ for only $5.99, Def Leppard’s album are totally missing. Atleast they have all of Pink Floyd!

The 17 Year Old Adsense Millionaire!

Posted on September 15, 2007 by Nirav

Here’s another depressing story of some 17 year old millionaire who makes $70,000 per month selling myspace templates. Did I say depressing? I meant inspiring!

Ashley Qualls, founder/CEO of Whateverlife.com doesn’t actually make money from the templates, but rather from adsense ads! Apparently her first adsense check from Google was for $2800, which is more money than Google EVER sent me. Of course, I haven’t filled a need (which she obviously did extremely well) but atleast I’m getting some remuneration (if you consider minimum wage to be any form of remuneration) for voicing my irreverent & often irrelevant opinions.

You can read the entire article online at Fast Company. She’s a pretty amazing teenager.

Linkworth’s New Referral Program

Posted on September 11, 2007 by Nirav

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

Posted on September 9, 2007 by Nirav

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.

Buying Canadian Income Funds For Passive Income (and Financial Freedom)

Posted on June 29, 2007 by Nirav

Yesterday, I bought some more Canadian Income Funds, also called Royalty Trusts or Canroys. As I mentioned before, I recently refinanced a property and I managed to pull some money out (totally tax-free!).

Rather than spend the money on an SUV or a big-screen TV, I opted to divide the money into 3 parts. The first 1/3rd went towards replenishing my emergency fund which was drawn down by vacancies in my rental properties. The second 1/3rd went towards future investments in summer just in case there’s a pullback in the stock market and the last 1/3rd went to building up my passive cash-flow.

Long time readers will realize that I haven’t made any effort display my net worth or any goals of net worth. That’s because I feel its a meaningless number. If I had a $1 million dollar net worth and it only generated $25,000 a year in income (like Cd’s did a few years ago) that’s pretty sad. On the other hand, if I owned a $1,000,000 car-wash that generated $125,000 that’s pretty significant.

My goal is to generate passive income. Its your passive income that provides financial independence, not your net worth. If you have $3,000/month through various passive income streams, you’ve got your basic food and shelter taken care of and you won’t starve if you lose your job. That is my short term goal. My longer term goal is generate $10,000/month in passive income so I can travel the world without worrying (or working).

I’m currently not even at 50% of my $3,000/month goal so at least 1/3rd of all future investments must take me towards that goal. That’s why I bought some Canroys yesterday. I bought Harvest Energy (HTE) and Canetic Resources(CNE). They generate revenue from oil and gas production and refining. The noteworthy part is that they payout around 12% dividend per year. Since the selling of oil and gas leads to a depletion of reserves, its important that they keep some of their revenue for future acquisition of new properties and for drilling new wells. Both of them have a payout ratio of under 80% which isn’t bad considering they have proven and probable reserve lifespans of 9.5 years.

There are Canroys with lifespans of 6-7 years and payout ratios of 95% that yield 15% but I’m suspicious of their longterm viability. These two seem like pretty safe bets. If oil prices rise there’s a chance of increased payout and also capital appreciation. If not, I’m still getting my 12% yield.

The only issue I have is that the Canadian Government takes its 15% tax straight out of my account. But even considering for that, my yield is still just over 10%. Besides, I get a US tax credit for that amount, so its not a total loss.

I also bought some units in Prism Income Fund(QSR.UN) which owns and operates nearly 500 fast-food franchises in Canada (Taco Bell, KFC, Long John Silver and Pizza Hut). Their stock has been pretty stable compared to other Canroys following the whole Taxation issue. Its also currently yielding 12% and while I don’t expect much capital appreciation, I don’t expect it to drop in value or its dividend to fluctuate with the price of oil and gas.

So now I’m one step closer to my goal of $3,000 in passive income. This brings my total passive income from Canroys to $300 per month. I’m also getting $300 from a loan to a developer at 2% per month. And I average around $300/month from my various online ventures. (Even though my online ventures aren’t passive, I enjoy pursuing them and I have geographic independence. Thats why I’m counting it).I’m also making around $150/month from my direct oil and gas drilling investments, so I’m almost 1/3rd of the way to my goal!

When I get the money back from the developer, it’ll be redeployed at a much lower rate. But I expect the cash flow from the direct oil drilling program to increase enough to cover this short-fall.

Opened a Roth IRA in 10 Minutes

Posted on April 4, 2007 by Nirav

I’ve been trying to open a Roth IRA for my wife for 2006 contributions at Zecco for a few weeks now.

Initially I couldn’t open their stupid .fdf file. Finally I gave in and updated my adobe acrobat to the latest version in order to open it, filled out the paperwork, printed it all out and asked the wife for a copy of her drivers license.

She didn’t have. She’s lost it and isn’t going to waste time at the DMV until after tax season is over. Bummer, without it Zecco will not open an account. Unfortunately tax season ends on 17th April this year, which is the last date I can make a 2006 contribution.

Total time wasted in this activity has been about 4-5 hours. This involved filling out the online application 3 times, calling customer support and being placed on hold for 30-45 minutes (and then giving up), emailing them, printing out the forms and then shredding them.

Instead I decided to go with TDAmeritrade. I currently have all my accounts with them and they have excellent customer service. They also sent me a free 2 GB Ipod when I asked them!

I went online and in about 10 minutes, the account was setup and funded via ACH.

Zecco may have free stock trades and ETF trades but it has significant drawbacks.
1. There is no customer support.
2. There is no technical support.
3. Too much paperwork to signup.
4. They charge you commissions for Mutual Funds.
TDAmeritrade has a TON of mutual funds that are no commission and no load. They also waive the minimum purchase amounts for most of them too.

I think Zecco is definitely over-rated. Besides that, TDAmeritrade gave me free trades for 45 days and a free copy of Money!

Also check out this post about Ben Stein’s Rule of Retirement Investing.

Earning Money Online

Posted on April 2, 2007 by Nirav

I read a really interesting post today on Earner$ blog aboutmaking $200 every day.

The first half of the post is just a reference to ‘earn money online’ which links to his site. This is a just a blatant (but clever) way to fool the search engines to rank his site higher for the search ‘earn money online’. The reason many bloggers (John Chow Dot Com included) convet this phrase is because a lot of people search for this term and if you’re ranked highly on a search engine for it you get a lot of ‘organic’ traffic which results in a lot of ad revenue.

However, later in the post he comes to the real meat. Basically you sign up for an affiliate program that pays upto $300 per signup and then find off-line ways to promote it. One way he suggests is buying an ebook package with reseller rights, adding your affiliate link to each ebook and selling it for next to nothing. It will spread virally and eventually you’ll have people signing up using your affiliate ID at $300 a pop!!

Sheer genius!

Monetizing Blog Using LinkWorth

Posted on July 18, 2006 by Nirav

A lot of people don’t like monetize their blogs. I don’t have any qualms about doing so as long as its text-based. Most people become blind to text based ads anyway. Its only the flash and images that are a nuisance. [I use Mozilla ad-block plugin to shut them out anyway].

I’m already monetizing this blog to a certain extent. In the left hand corner under “Sponsors” are websites that pay to be linked on my site. If you click on “Get your own Blog Sponsors” you’ll see I’m using LinkWorth. They’re pretty good. Easier to set up than Adsense. Its not click-based so there’s no issue of click-fraud and Google trying to weasel out of paying you.

The only downside is that you do have to wait for someone to sponsor your site. But if you have good content, that shouldn’t be an issue. I’ve also being trying Adbrite, but that doesn’t seem to attracted any advertisers. So far LinkWorth‘s been the best. I tried Adsense for several months, but finally when I was at the point of making $30/month they shut me down without any reason. But it seems to be working well for some people.

I’m not making a lot of money of the blog yet, just enough to fill a tank of gas each month. Luckily I have other income streams!

Achieving financial freedom through passive income

Category Archives: Earn Money Online