As I am working to establish a new passive income stream by writing content on Info Barrel, I am starting to learn some new things. For example, in order to earn income from your work, you must link up your Info Barrel (iB) account with your Google AdSense and/or Chitika accounts. After spending a lot of time on eHow, this is something new to me. This is just one of several Info Barrel tips and tricks I have picked up on recently.

One of the more interesting and very useful options that iB offers is the ability to track and analyze your live articles. Like eHow, Info Barrel provides the number of views to your content which can help identify your more popular (and potentially profitable) articles. The number of page views can be helpful, but there is still a lot of missing data out there that could assist us even more.

This is where Info Barrel has a clear advantage over eHow. As a feature it is offering to it’s members, you can link your iB account up to the FREE Google Analytics tool. I have just completed this setup in my account and am seeing some huge returns in the type of data I can analyze.

What Do You Need to Link Up Your Info Barrel Account?

There are two different things you need to do in order to setup Google Analytics with your Info Barrel account.

1. Write 10 Info Barrel Articles – In order to assign a Google Analytics Site ID to your iB account, you must first publish 10 articles on the site. Finding the time to write these first 10 articles is probably the hardest part of the entire process. If you are having troubles coming up with topics and ideas for content, be sure to check out this post – How to Get Topics for Blogging.

Once you have written 10 live articles, navigate to your “My Account” page in your iB account and the Google Analytics Site ID option should appear. Please note that prior to having 10 live articles, this option will not appear.

2. Link Up Your Analytics Account – Once you have published your first 10 articles on iB it is time to get your Analytics ID. If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account, go and create one. This is a free tool that you really need to take advantage of if you are serious about growing your passive income.

For some additional resources on setting up your Analytics account with your iB account, check out the following resources.

• Sign-Up for Google Analytics
• Add your Google Analytics ID to your Info Barrel Account

Why is Analytics Important to Your Info Barrel Articles?

If there is one thing that I have learned in the past few months is that in order to accelerate your passive income, you need to focus on what works. This sounds like common sense but it is something that is often overlooked by many in this business. One of the basic fundamentals of building passive income is to reduce the number of hours it takes you to earn income from a particular source. As a result, we need to automate and leverage as many tools as we can in order to succeed.

Using Google Analytics is one of those tools that you just should not pass up. The tool is free and you are only out the amount of time it takes to link up your iB account.

Here are just a few things you can track from your Info Barrel articles just by using Google Analytics.

• Number of Page Views – Easily track your most popular articles for a specified time period.
• Average Time on a Page – You can analyze how much time your visitors are spending on each article you write.
• Traffic Sources – Find out where your traffic is coming from – Google, Yahoo, other websites?
• Keywords – What keywords are users typing in to search engines to find your articles?
• Region & Country – What part of the world are your visitors coming from?

The amount of information that you can track using this FREE tool is amazing. The items I outlined above are just a few basic stats that you can collect.

Analytic Resources

Google Analytics is used by many of the industry experts who are successfully making money online. You can not only use this tool to link up with your iB articles, but can also use it for your other websites and blogs.

Here are a few additional resources you may want to check out to find out more about how Analytics can help your grow your online business.

• Cool Things We Can Learn About Internet Business From Analytics
• A Guide to Google Analytics and Useful Tools

Don’t forget to create your FREE Info Barrel account Today!

How do you track your Info Barrel articles? Do you use Google Analytics?

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Today’s guest post is from Steve at The Personal Finance Start-Up Blog. His blog documents the journey of a young adult’s journey from entry level to financial independence. If you liked this article and wish to read more about his views on personal finance, investing, frugality and free money deals, please consider subscribing to his feed.

Passive income can be defined in numerous ways, however, the most common definition is income earned without your direct involvement. This means that you have already put the work in to start earning the income and now you just sit back and watch a swelling bank account. Seeing as you’ve stumbled upon passive family income or are a regular reader, you probably are well aware of the benefits of passive income, but what about passive investing?

In my opinion, passive investing applies the same concepts as passive income. A large amount of energy is required to generate income and then once it’s passively invested, you just sit back and watch it grow.

Why should you take advantage of passive investing rather than active investing? Doesn’t passive investing prevent you from beating the market? Absolutely it does. The problem with active investing and trying to beat the market, is that at least 90% of the trades are performed by professionals with unlimited resources. This makes active investing a loser’s game. After putting significant time and effort into earning my income, do I really want to put even more time and effort into my investments to try to beat the market? You can call me lazy if you want to, but I’d much rather spend my time building more passive income streams.

Couch-Potato Portfolio

I want to highlight two types of passive investing: the couch-potato portfolio and life-cycle or target date retirement funds. The couch-potato portfolio requires investing half of your funds in an S&P 500 index and the other half in a fund tracking an Intermediate Bond Index. This is a 50/50 stock to bond asset allocation. The beauty of this portfolio is that you only have to invest in two funds and the funds have low costs. The only non-passive aspect of the couch-potato portfolio is that you have to rebalance your portfolio once a year to maintain the correct asset allocation.

Life-Cycle Funds

Life-cycle funds (or target date retirement funds) operate under an assumption that you will retire in or around a certain year. These funds are really a combination of funds that form a desired asset allocation, which changes based on your assumed retirement date. For instance, I hold the Vanguard Target Retirement 2050 Fund in my Roth IRA. The fund assumes that I will be retiring within 5 years of 2050. Currently, the fund has the following asset allocation: 10% bonds, 72% domestic stocks and 18% international stocks. As I get closer to my retirement, say 10 years from retirement, the fund asset allocation is projected to be: 34% bonds, 53% domestic stocks and 13% international stocks. Life-cycle funds are even more passive than the couch-potato portfolio as they rebalance automatically.

Actively Managed Mutual Funds

What about investing in actively managed mutual funds to beat the market average? I would classify actively managed mutual funds as passive investments since you are not doing any of the investing work, however, the costs of owning an actively managed fund are its downfall. Actively managed funds contain high fund expense ratios, sales charges, excessive turnover rates leading to higher tax costs and they might attempt to time the market. The costs on these funds can be as high as 4%, which means the actively managed fund must beat the market average by more than 4% to generate higher than average returns. I’ll take the fund that is designed to be average with costs as low as 0.20%!

Benefits of Passive Investing

One huge advantage of passive investing, through either the couch-potato portfolio or life-cycle funds, is the decrease in risk, without killing your returns. Diversification is one way to minimize your risk and maximize your returns. Both methods rely on index funds, which automatically diversify your investments. Additionally, with both methods you really don’t have to pay attention to your portfolio (with the couch-potato portfolio you have to rebalance once a year). Paying less attention reduces the psychological effects of a bear market. Finally, each method prevents you from losing significant chunks of your money during bear markets. The couch-potato portfolio prevents major losses by investing 50% in bonds. Life-cycle funds might lose a large chunk of money early on, however, you still have many years until retirement to make that money back. As you near your target retirement age, it transitions into a more risk averse fund to prevent major losses.

Final Thoughts

I’m very partial to passive investing as it requires little to no maintenance and the costs are minimized. I am intrigued by active investing and trying to beat the market, but history shows that this method provides inferior results. For this reason, I’m unwilling to invest my retirement funds actively. The goal of passive income is to put your income on autopilot, which is exactly what passive investing does for your asset allocation strategy.

Does anybody have any other ideas for passive investing?

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photo credit: ToniVCI like to write about new and exciting passive income opportunities on PFI. I often post the status of my income streams, pointing out what worked well for me and what did not. While I tend to give updates on my success and failures at income generation, I tend to leave one very important aspect out of my posts. I rarely write about time when it comes to growing and nurturing my income streams. Time (my 1st key to creating passive income) plays a huge role in growing income-generating opportunities.

The whole concept of passive income is built around investing your time upfront with the intent that the income will eventually come in and will continue to grow into the future.
photo credit: Lab2112Managing this upfront effort brings me to my 2nd key point, which is patience. Based on this upfront effort, a person who is interested in creating passive income must have patience. I know that I have been frustrated many times in the past when working on growing my streams. However, anytime I get frustrated about something that went wrong, I think back to this point. As an avid runner, I like to think of it as my 1/2 marathon training compared to a 40-yd dash. I am a long distance runner and like to pace myself. Creating passive income is the same way. You must be patient and pace yourself for the long term. It is not a get rich quick thing – or to fellow runners – a 40-yd dash. It is important to remember that you probably won’t earn much income when you first start out, but over time the income will come in.

As I stated above, you must invest a lot of your time and hard work upfront in order to be successful in generating passive income. The key here is that by investing your hard work upfront, overtime you will spend less and less time on growing your stream while your earnings increase. One of my downfalls is that I want to start and grow as many new income streams as I can right now. That of course takes time and effort upfront. I would love to be able to spend all my time right now growing all sorts of income streams. The problem is that I also have a job that is taking up several hours in my day. As the economy is tight, my company has a hiring freeze on right now. As a result, I have been working 12 hours per day for my job. My boss and I are trying to do the work of 5 people right now, which is starting to take its toll. Throw in at least 2 hours per day (Mon-Fri) dedicated to maintaining and writing for PFI, and that leaves about 10 hours for spending time with my family, sleeping, eating, and creating passive income. This comes to my 3rd key point of this post – time management. Because I have so few hours in the day to dedicate to creating passive income streams, I must use any available hour or minute to my advantage.

My family is very important to me. Parts of my goals for creating all of these passive income streams is to allow me to either completely stop working someday or to scale back on the type of career that I have. I am willing to work hard right now for the next few years so that someday, I will have all the time in the world.

Do you feel it is worth spending time upfront to create passive income with the hopes of getting that time back in the future?

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There is a new passive income site that I came across for the first time this morning called Compounding-Dividends. I actually found this blog by reading a recent post written by Online Dividends. The post by Online Dividends included information about a contest that Compounding-Dividends is currently holding. The purpose of the contest is to build traffic and back links to the bloggers site by having fellow bloggers link and comment on the site.

These are the competition rules taken directly from Compounding-Dividends contest post –
1 comment = 1 point

Competition will end 00:00:01 10 Oct 2008 Iraq time +3 GMT

I will be participating in this contest and more importantly I am interested in how this concept works. Over the next several weeks, I will be interested to learn if holding these types of events will increase organic traffic and help to build links. I am really focused on increasing my readership and am looking for new ideas. If you have any interest in this competition, I suggest you check out the site!

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