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Passive Income Results – July (2010)

John S. — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 11:06:02 +0000

It is hard to believe it is August already with fall just around the corner. The summer just seemed to fly by as usual, but I think I am about ready to start getting into some cooler weather. I know that our utility bills (water and electric) could sure use a break!

As August starts, it is time again to report out my July passive income earnings. I will admit that it has been a rough couple of months finding the motivation to keep trying to expand my multiple streams of income. However, I have a fresh look on things and hope to revamp my strategy. I have dropped a few hints below on what I will be working on over the next month.

Here are my results for July.

Niche Sites

I think if I calculated how much I have earned working on my two niche websites, it would probably come out to be about $.05 per hour! If I have learned anything about niche websites is that it takes a ton of time to build these things the right way if you want to make any significant income.

Here are my monthly income results for the two niche sites I maintain -

Niche Site #1 – $ 0.50
Niche Site #2 – $ 3.74

I decided to turn my first niche site into an article directory of sorts, offering interested parties a chance to post an article on the site with up to two outbound links. The articles must still conform to the overall theme, but it gives me a chance to focus on other tasks while keeping my niche site up and running.

As far as my second site, I am still maintaining the site adding new content every week and working to build links back to the articles. Just recently I saw some of the highest jumps in my targeted keywords in a really long time, so I have some extra motivation now to keep on plugging away.

eHow

I have not contributed a new article to eHow since March of this year and am still generating income from my past work. This is a perfect example of how powerful building passive income streams can be. Sure, I admit that eHow has had it’s issues in the past, but there are plenty of other passive income opportunities out there just waiting for people like you and me.

My monthly eHow earnings saw a 34.5% increase compared to the prior month. This was a big surprise since I had been on a downward trend the past couple of months. Here is the breakdown of my eHow earnings from the past two months.

July (2010)
- Earnings – $179.60
June (2010)
- Earnings – $133.49

GRAND TOTAL eHow EARNINGS (23 Months)

Earnings – $2,857.48
Articles Published – 270
Articles Moved – 7

Last month I mentioned removing 2 articles from eHow and publishing them elsewhere. I decided to remove 5 additional articles that had not earned any income yet. These articles needed some rework and just were not performing very well at all on eHow. I have since moved all 7 of these articles to other sites were I expect them to perform much better.

High Yield Savings Account

This is the first month that I have reported any high yield savings account data, but thought it was time to introduce this passive income stream. Interest rates are really crappy right now, but I was able to find a high yield investment through my credit union. My current savings rate is 1.50% which is very competitive for a savings account in today’s market.

As I start to move some of my emergency funds around to build a CD ladder, I was able to generate some savings account interest. This income stream will vary for a few weeks as I continue to consolidate my existing bank accounts at my credit union.

High Interest Savings

July – $29.04

Expect this number to fluctuate in the next couple of reports. I will also be adding my CD Ladder to my monthly passive income results once they start to earn passive income.

Web 2.0 Tools

I have renamed this income stream from Miscellaneous to Web 2.0 Tools. The income generated from this category consists of free Web 2.0 tools that I currently do not own or fully control. The internet properties include sites like HubPages, Info Barrel, Twitter, and more. Using a collection of these sites can add up to a nice little income stream overtime.

Web 2.0 Tools

HubPages (AdSense) – $14.18
Info Barrel (AdSense) – $9.42
Sponsored Tweets – $3.15
MyLikes – $0.28

Web 2.0 Tools TOTALS – $27.03

Passive Family Income

It is almost embarrassing to report how much income I earn from this site. It has been live now for well over 2 years and I can barely pull in $10 per month. Generating income from this site has never really been a high priority of mine, but I would still like to have it cover the costs of running the site.

Here are my results from the past two months on PFI.
Passive Family Income (AdSense)

July – $10.93
June – $9.90

Over the past 6 months or so I got away from writing about personal finance topics and the purpose of why I started this site. I plan to get back to writing about topics like paying down debt, building multiple income streams, and becoming financially independent.

I got carried away writing about eHow and niche websites a little too much and will begin to redirect my focus. This is not to say that I won’t write about these topics and my experiences, just not as much.

Passive Income Totals

My total monthly passive income earnings increased between June and July. Part of the increase was from starting to count my savings account interest that I am earning. The other big contributor was the sharp rise in eHow earnings in July which would be really nice to see continue.

GRAND TOTAL July – $250.84

August Outlook

As you can tell by now, I am planning somewhat of an overhaul when it comes to PFI as well as my goals for generating multiple streams of income. Over the next month, I plan to detail my goals for building a solid dividend paying stock portfolio that should provide years of solid income. I will also detail my experiences building a CD ladder and my quest for maximizing my return on investments, even with super low interest rates.

How are your passive income results for July?

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Passive Income Results – May (2010)

John S. — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:02:00 +0000

It is time once again to publish my passive income results from the prior month. This is actually the second month using my new format for documenting all of the earnings I am generating from my alternative income sources. The month of May was a busy one for me as I worked hard building links pointing to one of my niche websites. I won’t know for several months how effective this strategy will be, but am confident I am making progress.

Fortunately I have moved on from focusing primarily on eHow to generate passive income earnings and am spending my time building sites that I fully control. As I work to build these solid niche websites, I am leveraging several Web 2.0 tools to help send traffic to my sites while earning a little extra income from my efforts.

Here are my May results -

Niche Site #1

I still have not done a lot with this site, as I have really focused on building links to my other niche website. I don’t have any plans to scrap this site, but I need to start allocating some resources if I want to ever make any significant income. If I can start generating some decent income from some of my other endeavors, I hope to use those funds to help give this site a needed boost.

Here are my earnings results generated from this site during the past three months.

May – $3.21
April – $0.22
March – $18.18

Earning $3.21 in AdSense income last month actually isn’t all that bad considering I spent 0 hours on this site in the past three months.

Niche Site #2

The majority of my time spent during May was focused on building external links to this site. While the site has been live for well over a year, I neglected building any back links to the site. If I plan to eventually earn $100 per month from this website, I need to increase the amount of traffic which starts with solid back links.

Here are my earnings results generated from this site during the past three months.

May – $3.23
April – $10.81
March – $7.81

I earned a lot less in May from this website than I did in April and March. However, I have noticed a recent uptick in the amount of traffic I am sending to the site which is a positive sign. Hopefully all of the hard work that I am putting in building links will start to payoff.

All of the income noted above was earned via Google AdSense. I recently added a few Commission Junction Banner Ads to diversify the potential sources for income. I have never had much luck with using Commission Junction, but there are some relevant ads that I am testing out.

eHow

The income that I am generating from eHow continues to fall. Since the eHow platform was discontinued, I have seen a steady decrease in monthly earnings. I have not written a new article on the site since March, 2010.

If this income stream can remain above $150 in monthly earnings, I will be comfortable leaving my published articles on the site. If I continue to see lower and lower monthly earnings, then I may decide to publish them elsewhere.

My monthly eHow earnings took a (9.9%) hit compared to the prior month. I will closely monitor my results in the next couple of months before I make any long term decisions about my published eHow content.

Here is the breakdown of my eHow earnings from the past two months.

May (2010)
- Earnings – $162.69
April (2010)
- Earnings – $180.55

GRAND TOTAL eHow EARNINGS (21 Months)

Earnings – $2,544.39
Articles Published – 270

Miscellaneous Income Sources

I have included several different passive income streams into a miscellaneous category, as they did not fit into one of the larger groups. These types of income sources include monies generated from Web 2.0 tools as well as anything earned here on PFI. I am including my earnings from this site for the first time, even though it is not really considered passive income.

I saw a very nice jump in HubPages (Hubs) income, which can be attributed to all of the link building articles I have been submitting there. I increased my earnings by 70% between April and May on HubPages. It sure would be nice to push this income stream above $50 per month in consistent earnings.

HubPages

May – $24.70
April – $14.53

Just as I saw with HubPages, my Info Barrel (iB) earnings jumped by 60% between April and May. Even though I got almost the same number of page views between my iB articles and my Hubs, the income potential from Info Barrel is much less. This is a trend that I continue to see when comparing the two Web 2.0 tools.

Info Barrel

May – $5.83
April – $3.65

May marked the first month I generated any income from Xomba. I have started to write more and more Xomba articles in my link building project because of how high this site tends to rank.

Xomba

May – $0.24

I really don’t generate much income from PFI, but thought it was appropriate to document it. I have a few AdSense ads that show up on my articles once they have been published for 7 days. This allows me to keep my current content clean of ads, but still earn a trickle of income for my older posts.

Passive Family Income (AdSense)

May – $14.12

I am really impressed by HubPages as I am starting to dedicate more of my resources there. As I continue to work on building links to my niche websites, I should see an increase in earnings from both HubPages and Info Barrel.

Passive Income Totals

My total monthly passive income earnings increased by 2.21% between April and May. My eHow earnings took a hit, but the added income made from PFI help to offset this decrease. I am still working hard at building links to my niche websites and hopefully should see this show up in my monthly earnings reports.

GRAND TOTAL May – $214.02

June Outlook

My May income did not seem as impressive, compared to the amount of time and effort that was put in. In time I will reach my goals of becoming financial independent, it will just take a little longer than I thought it would. As I noted last month, I plan to add several other income streams to the mix, testing out a few new ideas. Writing online content has become the majority of my passive income earnings, so I need to start diversifying.

Some of the income streams that I am adding are not necessarily going to be passive. For example, I have started to publish articles on Constant Content. Depending on how users purchase these articles will determine if the income earned is passive or just one-time earnings. My intent is that these types of income streams can be used to fund other alternative projects to generate money. If I can earn a few hundred dollars per month writing Constant Content articles, that money can then be used to purchase dividend paying stocks or to invest in a certificate of deposit.

My goal is to add several more income streams that over time can become passive through automation and outsourcing. I have learned over the past two years that building a income stream that is 100% passive from day 1 is extremely difficult. The next couple of months will be challenging and at times frustrating, but should pay off over the next several years.

What forms of alternative income do you generate that are not from writing?

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Passive Income Results – April (2010)

John S. — Tue, 04 May 2010 10:01:06 +0000

Starting this month, I will be publishing my passive income results together instead of separating out my eHow earnings as I did in the past. Since I will not be publishing any new articles directly through eHow (see my 5 reasons why I won’t miss eHow), I thought it made sense to consolidate these income reports. The monthly reports will include my passive income earnings as well as other monies generated from alternative sources (other than my job).

Here are my April results -

Niche Site #1

I all but abandoned this niche site in the past couple of months, and my earnings are showing it. I have quite a bit of good content published on this site already, so now I need to begin focusing on adding backlinks to the site. This is an area that I never use to focus a lot on and as you can tell, my earnings agree.

Here are my earnings results generated from this site during the past two months.

April – $0.22
March – $18.18

All earnings generated through this site are currently from AdSense.

Niche Site #2

I recently updated my 2010 SMART Goals to be more realistic than what I first planned on at the beginning of the year. My new goal from this site is to earn $100 per month in recurring income (previously set at $500) by the end of this year. Since I am learning a lot of new things about building niche websites, I realized they take a lot more time than what I originally thought.

Here are my earnings results generated from this site during the past two months.

April – $10.81
March – $7.81

I earned $3.00 more in April than last month which was nice to see since I did not spend anytime on the site. All earnings generated from this site are currently coming from AdSense, but I plan to add a few other income sources in the coming months. Regardless of how many income sources I add to this site, I still need to drive traffic to it.

If I want to get this site to $100 per month anytime soon, there is one things I need to focus on – building backlinks.

eHow

To no surprise, my eHow earnings fell again in April compared to last month. Even though the switch from publishing on the eHow platform to Demand Studios was not going to impact earnings, it appears that it did.

I did not publish any new articles during April on eHow, compared to 21 in March. My earnings took a (15.3%) hit compared to the prior month and seem to reflect what I earned back in January and February of this year. It seems that I have fallen back into the ~$180.00 monthly earnings range.

Here is the breakdown of my eHow earnings from the past two months.

April (2010)
- Earnings – $180.55
- Articles Published – 0
March (2010)
- Earnings – $213.17
- Articles Published – 21

GRAND TOTAL eHow EARNINGS (20 Months)

Earnings – $2,381.70
Articles Published – 270

Miscellaneous Income Sources

Based on how I am trying to setup my passive income streams, I have lumped several other sources into a miscellaneous category. These income sources would include any monies generated from HubPages and Info Barrel at this time.

HubPages

April – $14.53
March – $12.00

Info Barrel

April – $3.65
March – $4.74

I actually like using HubPages a lot and think I can significantly grow this income stream in the coming months. The nice thing about using HubPages and Info Barrel is that I can earn income while at the same time build backlinks to my niche sites.

Passive Income Totals

I earned just over $200 in April in passive income. Hopefully I can look back on this month as a turning point in my efforts to become financially independent.

GRAND TOTAL April – $209.76

May Outlook

It is time to start reinventing my approach to earning passive income. I just hit my 2 year anniversary with Passive Family Income. While I have learned a lot in the past 24 months, I am not very pleased with my progress. My original intent was not to become a professional writer to generate alternative income. However, as you can tell above, all of my income is generated as a result of writing.

Over the next couple of weeks, I plan to get back to focusing on building diversified passive income streams that come from several sources, not just writing. I am going to go back to the basics and begin focusing on other income streams such as high yield securities and other investments. I will also go back and look into forming an online store as well as researching other ways to generate income that don’t involve writing.

I will be focusing a lot of time reinventing my plan over the next couple of weeks. At the same time, I will not give up writing either but will make it less of a focus of where my time (that is very precious to me) is spent.

Where do you create alternative sources of income from that don’t involve writing?

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HubPages versus Info Barrel – Building Recurring Income Online

John S. — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:47:42 +0000

Now that eHow has replaced their writing platform in place of Demand Studios, I am revisiting other sites where I can build solid recurring passive income streams. There are two such sites that I have been publishing content on already which seem to be likely candidates to focus on. I have been using HubPages (Hubs) and Info Barrel (iB) for over the past 6 months and have had mixed results thus far.

Today I wanted to provide a breakdown of my analysis comparing HubPages versus Info Barrel with actual statistics. These real life stats are based on traffic and AdSense earnings generated over the past 4 full months (December – March). In some cases, HubPages seems to be the clear favorite while Info Barrel seems to be superior in other areas.

Here are my statistics and commentary on which site is superior.

Published Articles and Notes

During the 4 month time period, I had 33 live Hubs compared with 18 articles published on Info Barrel. While a few articles on both sites were published during the 4 months, I will not factor that into my analysis.

One other important note is that most of my articles on both sites use similar keywords. Based on this, I feel comfortable comparing my published content from both of these sites against one another.

Page Impressions

Page impressions (or traffic) is necessary if you want to earn any significant recurring income from these sites. In this case, Info Barrel seems to get a lot more traffic than HubPages during the same period of time. The results below are even more exaggerated considering that I almost have twice as many Hubs (33) as iB (18) articles.

Page Impression Stats

HubPages – 530
Info Barrel – 827

Even though I had fewer published iB articles, I still had 56% more traffic over the 4 month time period compared with my Hubs. Since these stats can really vary on several factors it is hard to make any concrete assumptions when it comes to traffic and page impressions. I do however think that Info Barrel (for whatever reason) can definitely bring in more traffic.

Clicks

While traffic is really important, the amount of clicks is what brings in the dollars. As you can tell from my results below, I am seeing a lot more clicks on my Hubs.

Click Stats

HubPages – 71
Info Barrel – 15

These results are very interesting, as the traffic from my iB articles is much higher but the number of clicks is far lower. Could the ad placement found on HubPages be that much better than it’s competition? Or is something else skewed in my results?

Page CTR

Another interesting statistic (which is derived from the previous two sets of data) shows my click through rate much higher on my Hubs.

CTR Stats

HubPages – 13.40%
Info Barrel – 1.81%

I was actually amazed when I saw how much greater my CTR was for my Hubs compared to my iB articles. This tells me that while I can probably get more traffic on my Info Barrel articles, I am almost sure to get a lot less clicks.

Earnings

Obviously by now you can probably guess which site brought in more AdSense income over the past 4 months. Here are my earnings results generated from AdSense.

AdSense Stats

HubPages – $40.09
Info Barrel – $12.70

One important note, I earned about $0.56 per click on my Hubs versus $0.85 per click from my iB articles. This is a direct result of Info Barrel paying out more revenue to its writers than HubPages (which is another important factor to use when comparing both sites).

Final Thoughts

In the end I think both sites are worth leveraging to generate residual income online. Are either of them a replacement for eHow? Not really. I think both sites can bring in some decent recurring income while providing necessary backlinks for some of my other niche sites. I plan to continue to publish content on both sites (along with several others) with the intent of driving traffic to sites I own while earning a little income along the way.

What other sites will you be leveraging in place of eHow to build recurring income streams?

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The $5 Mini-Site Formula – Week 2

John S. — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:59:36 +0000

I am now through my second week experimenting with The $5 Mini-Site Formula. I am using this technique to build one of my niche websites. If everything goes to plan, I should be able to generate $150 each month in recurring income.

As a part of my SMART Goals for this year, I plan on generating $500 per month from at least 3 niche websites. While I am nowhere close to reaching those targets yet, I am leveraging the $5 Formula to begin building one of my sites. If I am successful with this experiment, I will plan to replicate the process on another one of my niche websites.

Here are some of my recent notes of implementing this new process.

Outsourcing

In my last report I mentioned that I would be spending about $80 to hire a ghost writer to help me with this project. In order to be successful building a solid income producing machine, I need some help. I just don’t have the available hours in my day to balance work and family, while also working on building passive income.

I outsourced several short articles (250 – 300 words) centered around my keywords that will be used to drive traffic to my niche website. The ghost writer that I hired came at a very low price, but asked for 14 days to complete the project. One of the risks of
outsourcing articles is losing some of the control. While I would have preferred to have the articles completed in less time, I compromised with the writer to lower my costs.

I anticipate these articles to be completed this week and published on various article marketing websites.

Traffic

According to the The $5 Mini-Site Formula, I will need to drive about 120 visitors to my site each week in order to bring in $5 of income per day. While that doesn’t seem like too much, I have found it a bit challenging to do with a new website.

During the second week of this experiment, I received 39 pageviews to my niche website, which was down from 59 pageviews in my last report. That is only an average of 5.5 pageviews per day, which is not exactly where I expected to be at this point.

Why so few visitors in my experiment? I have not had the opportunity to follow through on many of the remaining steps laid out in the formula. Once I am able to finish the outstanding tasks on this project, I am certain that I can land 17 visitors per day.

Earnings

Even though my pageviews were down in the last 7 days, my earnings actually went up. I earned $2.32 this past week in AdSense earnings compared to $0.44 before. I am now averaging $0.33 per day, which is still a long way to $5 per day that I am looking to generate using this process.

The one thing that I can take from all of this is that I believe I made a good choice on keyword selection. While my traffic and earnings are nowhere near were I need them to be, I see some positive results on the CPC of my site. As traffic increases, I will most certainly see my earnings rise exponentially.

Remaining Tasks

Why have I not hit $5 per day in earnings yet using The $5 Mini-Site Formula? The fact is that I just haven’t had the time to complete all the necessary steps. One of my lessons learned I will take from all of this is that I can’t build a niche website on my own in a week, given my current schedule.

I plan to put time back in my day by using some batching techniques while leveraging my ghost writer in the coming days. If I am successful with both, I should see a nice jump in traffic and earnings next week!

Have you tried The $5 Mini-Site Formula yet? Are you seeing successful results?

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